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THE WHITE CROSS LIBRARY. 




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THE 



SWAMP ANGEL 



BY 



PRENTICE MULFORD. 



Copyrighted February, iSSS, by 
F. J. NEEDHAM, PUBLISHER, 

No. 22 TREMONT ROW, 
BOSTON. 









BOSTON, MASS : 

PRESS OF EMERY-HUGHES, 

146 OLIVER ST. 







THE SWAMP ANGEL 



CHAPTER I. 

ALPHA. 



I had long entertained the idea of building for 
myself a house in the woods, and there living alone. 
Not that I was cynical, or disgusted with the world. 
I have no reason to be disgusted with the world. It 
has given me lots of amusement, sandwiched be- 
tween headaches, periods of rej)entance, and sundry 
hours spent in the manufacture of good resolutions, 
many of which I could not keep, because they spoiled 
so quickly on my hands. I have tried to treat the 
world pretty well, and it has rewarded me. For the 
world invariably returns kick for kick, frown for 
frown, smile for smile ; and if my reader is a pretty 
girl, you will keep your beauty far longer by having 
ever a smile on your face, that comes from the heart, 
and is not for company occasions, painted on the sur- 
face. 

I found at last, in New Jersey, a piece of woods, a 
swamp, a spring near by, a rivulet, and, above all, 
a noble, wide-branching oak. The owner willingly 
consented to my building there, and under the oak 
I built. 

That was five years ago. I was then forty-nine 

3 



years of age, and feel no older oow; in fact, not 
quite s<» old. What others may Peel, about my ,k time 
of life," is another affair. The main point La involved 
in one's own feelings on this head. While a bottle 
of champagne is actively at work in a man's organ- 
ization, what does he eare how others feel as to his 
condition or age ? 

I had seen, in these torty-nine years, two years of 
life as an indifferent sailor on a merchant vessel and 
whaler. On the latter I was cook, to the misery of 
all on board who came within the range of my culi- 
nary misdeeds. It was not discovered that I had 
never learned this noble and necessary art until our 
vessel was off soundings, and then it was too late to 
repair the damage. I was twelve years in California, 
where I dug a little gold and a good deal of dirt. I 
have taught school, tended bar, kept a grocery, run 
for the legislature, been a post officer, peddled a very 
tough article of beef on horseback, to the miners on 
the Tuolumne river bars and gulches, started a hog 
ram-he and failed, served as a special policeman, 
and tax collector, kept an express office, prospected 
for silver in the Nevadas, found nothing but snow, 
scenery, and misery, pre-empted no end of land, laid 
out towns which are laid out yet, run a farm to 
weeds and farrow land, and lectured, and written a 
good deal for the papers. I have tried my constitu- 
tion and its by-laws in ways both reputable and 
otherwise, but it 's sound yet, though I could have 
had as many diseases as I liked, by believing in them 
and paying the doctor and druggist for them. I have 
seen (ape Horn, London, Paris. Vienna, a whale in a 



"flurry," a ship's crew in mutiny, and a woman who 
did not want a new bonnet. But she was dead. I 
lived two years in England, had a splendid time on a 

very small capital, saw the land from the Scottish 
border to the Straits of Dover, and Lived with over 
thirty families, high, low, rich, poor, patrician, and ple- 
bian, I have an ex-mother-in-law. Before I started 
out in life, when a boy of fourteen, I had charge 
of a country hotel, which I ran ashore in four years ; 
but it never cost the girls and boys of my youthful 
era a cent for horse-hire out of my stables. I had a 
good time keeping that hotel, which my poor father, 
on dying, left to my mother. She had necessarily 
to give it largely in charge of her eldest and only 
son. I was that son. My mother disliked the busi- 
. being soberly inclined, and I got her out of it 
ton as possible, by managing, or rather misman- 
aging, things in such a way that the expenditures 
went considerably beyond the income. So I did 
a good tiling for her, as well as having a good time 
myself. We kept a bar, which the boys of my own 
size patronized to a considerable extent, so their 
refreshments cost them little or nothing, generally 
nothing ; which fact, though conducive to the gen- 
eral hilarity, did not increase the profits. My native 
village was a place where for a boy to tell his 
mother all he had thought, felt, and experienced for 
the last twenty-four hours, would have brought him 
enough scolding, and bald, ungilded admonition, as 
to terrify him out of all goodness and candor for a 
month ; where the girls went regularly to the even- 
ing prayer-meetings, there to wish that the boys 



•; 



might not fail to be on the outside of the church, to 
sec thein home : where the hoys systematically and 
conscientiously, and without a pang, lied to their 
fathers, as their fathers had lied to grandpa ; where 
at fifteen they called mother the " old woman," and 
at heart ridiculed her ignorance of numerous things 
outside of her kingdom, because they had caught the 
habit and idea from "pa"; where one-half the town 
were total teetotalers, who hated whiskey drinkers 
worse than they did whiskey, and called all who dif- 
fered with them in belief and practice hard names 
at intemperate temperance meetings, and where the 
speakers got as drunk on zeal, enthusiasm, prejudice, 
and excitement, as other drunkards do on gin. I 
managed to abolish our bar in a few years, on the 
principle of making the expenditures over-size the 
income, and so did another good thing, as the young 
men had then to go elsewhere for their stimulant, 
and pay for it, too ; a condition of affairs always pro- 
motive of temperance, if not of morality. When I 
had accomplished all this, and that 's a good deal to 
accomplish before reaching the age of eighteen, I went 
forth into the world to seek my fortune, and have 
been seeking it ever since, with results, of course, 
some for and some against me. But I 've had a good 
time, anyway, and I intend to have better. 



CHAPTER II. 

LAYING THE CORNER-STONE. 

I bought about fifty dollars' worth of boards and 
joist, and had them carted and dumped under my 
oak. No hand save mine laid the foundations. I laid 
the floor first. I had no well-defined plan about 
building; I laid my floor boards first, because it came 
handiest so to do. It was so much of the house 
built, anyway. I let the structure grow naturally. 
I presume a professional carpenter would have put 
up the frame before laying the floor. But I felt that 
if I got the floor off my mind, the rest of the edifice 
would grow on it somehow, as it did. I know that 
I violated all the architectural proprieties in build- 
ing as I did, and performed one hundred times the 
work necessary ; yet the work to me was all play. 
For it was nothing but a big box of. twelve-foot 
boards, and when completed, not near so ornate or 
regular in shape as those the manufacturers box up 
their horse-cars in, for shipping to distant places. 
But I was not building to suit propriety or other peo- 
ple. I was building to suit myself. I wanted entire 
liberty, for once in my life, to make blunders without 
being inspected, over-looked, criticised, and sermon- 
ized by other people. I had such liberty, and I made 
the blunders. Never during the two months that 
I was engaged in putting up this ramshackle shanty 

7 



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did a soul come near me to stare at me, and gape, 
and tell me I was doing things wrong; or even if 
such a pest did not say what he thought, to look as 
if lit- thought it all the same, and in so thinking make 
me Eeel that he thought it. Such people are pestif- 
erous. I want to do things in my own way. and 
make my own mistakes, and learn as I go along; and 
when I get ready to ask how to do them better, of 
anyone that knows better, then, and not till then, do 
I want advice and suggestion. It is a luxury to go 
blundering on in this way; and 1 had it. and was 
willing to pay for it. My lot was at the end of a big 
corn-field, in sight of but one honse ; out of sight of 
all main roads, and nobody could get near me, unless 
they walked a mile to do so. 

So in the snow and the rain, as well as the mud, 
into which I managed to tramp a good deal of the 
semi-swampy soil about my house by hundreds of 
possibly unnecessary footsteps, did I build and blun- 
der, during the months of January and February. 
I slept in a neighbor's house at night, footed a mile 
to the railway station in the morning, reached 
the city by half past seven, did my two hours 1 
work in a newspaper office, made a summary of 
the same eternal round of events, such as murders, 
burglaries, suicides by pistol, razor, rope, or poi- 
son, embezzlements (high-toned), thefts (low-toned), 
smash-ups, fires, bursted boilers, falling elevators, 
gas explosions, kerosene burnings, failures, and 
everything else, which are always happening in all 
civilized communities just the same one year after 
another, the only difference being that the victim 



9 



or the villain has a different name this year from 
what he had at the same date last. I wonder why 
people are interested in reading such a monotonous 
and ghastly catalogue of horrors as I dished up 

for them daily. I wonder if they will so continue 
to read through all eternity, in case their lives 
are spared that somewhat incomputable period. 
I wonder what is the great necessity or profit of 
knowing, after you have eaten your breakfast cakes 
and sausage, that a tramp was found last night hang- 
ing to a tree in Central Park, or that an idiot killed 
himself with prnssic acid and died on a park bench, 
where possibly you may sit tomorrow, because the 
girl he wanted to marry and make miserable pre- 
ferred to marry and be made miserable by some other 
idiot. I wrote also editorials, and told the world 
how in certain matters, social, political, and other- 
wise, things were awfully mismanaged, and how they 
ought to be managed. I was then more interested in 
reforming the world than in reforming myself, and 
kept the electric light of my brain turned far more 
on other people's sins or mistakes than on my own. 
I worked at this calling long enough to find out that 
there are three kinds of editors : editors who can 
write, and have business talent besides ; and editors 
who can write all about it, not having practical 
gumption enough to drive a nail straight, or tell a 
ten-months' chicken, when dressed, from a tough, 
ten-year-old hen ; and lastly, editors who can scarcely 
write at all, but who know how to set others to writ- 
ing, and tell them what to write about, and so work 
their writers* brains to great profit to themselves, as 



10 



they are justified in doing; for if yon \e got one tal- 
ent, and don't work your other business talent along 
with it. some one else will turu thai crank, and turn 
what might be your profits from such talent, into 
their owu pockets. I 've sat in editorial rooms along- 
side of college-educated men, whose minds were 
storehouses of book learning and little else, who 
were hacking away with their pens at any work the 
boss cut out for them, at ten dollars a week: who 
wrote and grumbled, and grumbled and wrote, poor 
fellows, because, as they said, their talent wasn't bet- 
ter appreciated : who were always talking of what they 
would do, if they only had a better show ; who railed 
at this mercenary age, and the mercenary manage- 
ment of the paper they wrote for, and who never 
dreamed that the only way for a man to get a fair 
show in this world to air his ideas is to take responsi- 
bilities and make the "show" for himself, just as the 
head man in the office down stairs, who paid them 
their weekly pittance, had done, and who used them 
as literary grubbing hoes, because they dare not be 
anything else but grubbing hoes. 

However, I served up daily this intellectual stew, 
made from the ingredients of our barbaric civiliza- 
tion, with a tolerably clear conscience ; first, because 
I was well paid for it ; secondly, I liked the work ; 
and thirdly, because the public wanted their daily 
horrors spiced as I spiced it ; and then at half past 
ten in the forenoon, I flew back by rail to my be- 
loved swamp, where I labored till dusk, overlooked 
only by an occasional crow, perched on a neighbor- 
ing tree, cross, tired, and hungry, because there was 
no young corn to pull up. 



CHAPTER III. 

BUYING TOOLS, AND ABOUT BUYING. 

Before building, I bought many carpenters' tools 
wherewith to build. I bought tools during the en- 
tire period of building. I bought many more than 
were necessary. Any bungler of a carpenter could 
have put up my shanty with a saw, hammer, and the 
necessary nails. But saws and planes and chisels 
and augers, with new handles and bright, glittering 
edges, became fascinations for me. I became in- 
volved and drawn into this peculiar vortex of tool 
buying, and could scarcely pass a hardware shop, 
without thinking I wanted some of the wares I saw 
in the window. I did want them. But I didn't 
need many of them, save, possibly, the need of the 
pleasure they gave me in the buying, and afterwards 
in contemplating them. There is a great charm in 
buying new things, whether you need them or not. 
A passion for buying can so suddenly break out, and 
empty your purse much faster than you can fill it. 
I can well understand and sympathize with ladies 
who go out shopping, and return home dripping with 
ten times more bundles than they intended. There 
is a mysterious and dangerous influence in stores, 
tempting you to buy things, that you find, on getting 
home, you don't want. I found, after a time, that 
the only successful method of resisting this was to 

11 



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brace up, and resolve firmly to buy only the article 
I bad previouly determined to buy. Armed with 
this. I could get in a store and out again without 
being Loaded down with gimcracks. 

Much that I bought needlessly I did while under 
the influence of those small commercial magicians, 
the clerks, who make yon feel, through and through, 

on going into their stores, that you must buy some- 
thing, whether yon wish to or not; and that to look 
five minutes at their wares, without buying, La rob-' 
bing them of valuable time. Yon must go with all 

your wits and full pressure of decision about you. in 
order to resist successfully the silent power of these 
men. The whole atmosphere of some stores is sur- 
charged with a buy-compelling element. You are in 
its bonds and fetters immediately on going in. From 
tin- boss down, all are determined that no customer 
passes out without buying something. That thought 
of determination is literally in the air; and if you are 
tired and hungry, and, above all, hurried, or unde- 
cided, your mind will be captured by these mercan- 
tile magicians. They will put their thought in you. 
You will think it and not your own. Their minds 
are centred on a purpose — to sell. Hence they are 
strong in that direction. Your mind is not centred 
on anything. Hence you are weak. So you buy 
what they make you buy, when you think you are 
buying it yourself. You 're not. They 're selling it 
to you. Small blame to them. It's their business to 
sell. It's your business, and my business, when we 
become buyers, to go to the seller with something of 



13 



a clear idea of what we want, first ; secondly, not to 

go in a fluster; thirdly, not to have our mind in that 
store half an hour before our body gets there, as we 
must have when suffering that general complaint, 
hurry; and then we may find, on getting home, that 
we \e bought the thing Ave wanted, and not the thing 
the dry-goods magician forced us to buy, and which, 
on getting the use of our own wits, we find we nei- 
ther like, want, or need. I don't blame salesmen for 
so working their spells on purchasers. It's a matter 
with them of self-protection, after all; for if they 
sympathized with us, and thereby got into our flab- 
by, aimless, undecided frame of mind, we then should 
be working and controlling their minds and acts, 
bringing them temporarily into a state of semi-idiocy, 
during which they might sell out the whole store to 
us at half price. It is a wonder to me that salesmen 
and saleswomen can keep from going more or less 
insane, when you consider the shoals of cross-grained, 
undecided, aimless, and run-down-in-mind-and-body 
people, they have daily to meet and deal with. Be- 
cause, if you live all the time in an insane asylum, 
your own head is apt to tumble more or less off its 
base ; and some of our big stores, when filled with 
hurried skurried customers, especially during the 
holidays, do suggest the approaches to an insane asy- 
lum. Were I a salesman, I would sell my father and 
mother and all the lot, down to the third and fourth 
generations, a brass watch for one of gold, and that 
with a clear conscience, providing they came to buy 
of me in that wicked and iniquitous frame of mind 



14 



born of hurry, indecision, and the desire of getting 
something for nothing. Carrying wash a head about 
and inflicting it on people is an outrage and a public 
injury; and I have carried sneh a head, and did this 
sin and outrage many and many a time myself. 



CHAPTER IV. 

ABOUT MY HENS. 

I avish to tell the remainder of my building trials 
in the present tense. I don't know why, but in so 
doing I am brought in closer connection with my 
house-building experience. The reader w T ill there- 
fore consider me as building my house, as he travels 
along with me in these pages. 

I have built a hen-coop, and keep hens. The hen- 
coop is built on the experience and consequent skill 
gathered in building the house, and as a result, is 
in point of symmetry a better construction than the 
house. I have always loved hens from infancy, 
being brought up among them by my widowed ma- 
ternal grandmother, who lived alone in an old house, 
with numerous hens and cats. She was a queer, 
quiet, old lady, who never went to church, read her 
Bible regularly every Sunday, would never have 
a coal-stove in her house, burned wood, never saw a 
railroad or sailed on a steamboat, never went out 
visiting, made beautiful mince pies, ate a piece reg- 
ularly every night at nine o'clock, gave me one, ditto, 
took snuff, and hated old T , the bawling under- 
taker who lived next door, who was on the howl 
from morning till night, whose yard was always 
crammed with hearses, broken wagons, barrows, 
boxes, barrels, lumber which she said, "always looked 
a> if the devil had tipped up his cart there." 

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She h'ad seen a 1 > i t of the Revolutionary war, had 
English soldiers quartered in her father's house, 

and said she liked thein far better than the Ameri- 
can "skinners" and "cowboys," who, crossing Long 

Island Sound on boats from the Connecticut shore, 
plundered and outraged our people, on pretence thai 

they were Tories. It was my grandmother's delight 
on Saturdays, our market day. to watch the running 
away of some farmer's team, as one or more generally 
did, and see the butter pats fall out of the wagon's 
rear into the dusty street, while the proprietor ran 
after, crying " Whoa ! " and picking them up as they 
fell. But she could prevail on her hens to lay more 
eggs, in proportion to their numbers and size, than 
any other hens in the town. 

She did n't like real good boys, and made pets of 
the notoriously bad ones, and would call them in 
betimes and treat them to her fresh gingerbread and 
pie. She liked to have me with her, and I was the 
only one of the family she cared to see ; and I liked 
to be with her, much against my parents' inclina- 
tions, for I had with her more liberty and more pie, 
and could play till nine o'clock at night with our 
gang of off-color street urchins, of whom the boss 
and " Big Injun " was, of course, " Nigger Hen," who 
lorded it over us and licked us, when necessary, and 
had more spending money than all the rest of us put 
together. He was the bosom friend of my extreme 
youth, until one day I was put up by the mischievous 
clerks in my father's store, to prevail on him to blow 
a trick wind-mill loaded with flour, a cloud whereof 
puffed in Nigger Hen's face as he applied his lips to 



1 



the blowing tube. For that In- cast me off. So I lost 
him, and took up with ••Urn Hill," whose dailylife 
was an incessant lugging of pics in a basket from 
his mother's house to his father's pie, peanut, and 
root beer store. I loved Henry, because, in passing 
through our yard, as he was obliged to do, he allowed 
me to sample his pies. We would retire together to 
the recesses of an empty dry-goods box, and knew 
skilful methods of raising, with an old spoon, the 
upper crusts of the mince, huckleberry, and other 
pies, and abstracting a prudential portion of the inner 
contents, and consigning them to our boyish and 
never-satisfied stomachs. So Henry rested while I 
ate. Externally, Henry was more or less pie, which 
clung to him in fragments; and where he wasn't 
pie he was ice cream, in stains, for he used to work 
the freezer in his mother's cellar; and Ave had 
another old spoon there, hidden in a chink of the 
wall, with which we tested that ice cream at fre- 
quent intervals, as it grew from the liquid to the 
congealed form of combination. Little did the little 
aristocracy of my native town, who ate ice cream in 
Mrs. Hill's parlors, dream whose fingers had first 
been in it: for when time or circumstances were 
pressing, we found fingers as handy as spoons; and 
I have sometimes noticed, later in life, that people 
who are enjoying choice and exclusive morsels, may 
little dream what may have handled such morsels an 
hour before they were served up. 

As I am speaking here of hens, or at least intended 
to. on commencing this chapter, I have thought it 
proper to introduce " Nigger Hen " and "Hen Hill " 



L8 



first. I have inherited both my grandmother's pas- 
sion and talent for keeping hens, and experience the 
.same thrill of pleasure <>n finding the half dozen or 
dozen daily, of white, (dear, newly-laid eggs in the 
nest, that I did when a boy of twelve. The beauty 
and value of life lies in being aide to enjoy what you 
enjoyed when the body was young, and the spirit. 
with its new suit of clothes, having shaken off the 
<»1<1 one, lias come again, "dressed up," into this 
mundane world. It is Erom the age of four till four- 
teen that the sun shines with a glory, and the moon 
with a lustre, and the very grass and leaves seem 
fresher and greener than in Later years, and why'/ 



CHAPTER V. 

MENTAL DIFFICULTIES. 

The house lias tour sides, a sloping roof, two large 
windows fronting south, one hole for the door, another 
for tlif stove-pipe, and about one hundred and fifty 
cracks; most of the cracks 1 made myself, incident- 
ally and accidentally, in failures to make the ends of 
the hoards meet properly at the corners, and the rest 
made themselves, through the "checking" or splitting 
the unseasoned lumber. When the warm spring 
stiu came, I was surprised to see how the outer boards 
w<»uld squirm and split : knots fell out also, and left 
hoh-s. large and small : 1 got ahead of them by nailing 
boards over them. I had no idea before that nature 
had so many unseen forces, always at work to inter- 
fere with man's constructions. When the frost came 
out of the ground, causing a movement in the soil, 
my floor settled into perceptible undulations. Of 
course tin- roof and sides, sympathizing with the 
floor, Bettled also. Air came up through the floor 
I headed that off by a covering of old oil- 
cloth. Then rain came through sundry roof cracks: 
1 stopped that with a covering of new oil-cloth, of 
gaudy pattern and bright colors. It was a gay roof, 
r than any part of the interior: it reminded one 
of a new check ulster, covering and concealing a coat 
full of years, holes, and experience. People laughed 

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at 1 1 1 \ oil-cloth sheathed roof. They said, "Why oof 
use tin. or shingles?" "Because," I said, "oil-cloth 

is cheaper by half, and it will last as lou-- as I want 
tin- roof." Bui they said. "It's odd covering a roof 
with oil-cloth." "Well,"] said, "what if it is odd? 
Somebody must always do tin* odd thing first, and 
['ve done it. Columbus was odd when he insisted 
on 'going west' to find a new land. Von poke fun 
at the <><\d man or woman, and may be in a twelve- 
month you "11 all l)c practicing his or her oddity, 
pecially if you can make two cents by it." 

The article I had most of. and took least of. in my 
house-building, was time. My mind was always 
ahead of my work, rather than on it. If nailing on 
one hoard. I was thinking of the next, or possibly 
endeavoring to generate a plan for the hen-coop. I 
was always trying to strain the building ahead in 
my mind : I strained only myself. A thing can't be 
done well, any faster than when your mind works the 
hotly easily and gently on the thing it's now doing. 
Nailing boards and thinking hen-coop brought me 
smashed fingers. My hammer wanted then the at- 
tention I was giving the hen-coop. The lack of it 
sent the head on my finger, instead of the ten-penny 
nail I was driving. 

I find that to do things, and do them at their 
best, it is necessary to put all the mind or thought 
you happen to have about you on the thing you 're 
doing "right now." whether that doing he the driv- 
ing of a nail, or the writing of an article which you 
imagine will make the world's hair stand on end (and 
it's in big luck you are if vou raise a single hair). I 



have come to the conclusion thai a man's thoughts 

arc literally his strength of muscle, as well as mind ; 
and it' you don't believe it. gel on a topsail yard in a 
gale off Capo Hatteras, or a Pampa gust off the La 
Plata, and while you're trying, with the rest of the 
watch, to flatten down and haul in a rebellious sail, 
heavy with rain or sleet, flapping your face with its 
heavy-laden canvas lists, and doing its hot to knock 

you overboard, see then it' it's the time or place to 
think what you M say to the gjrl you left behind you, 
or the girl who left you behind for the other fellow, 
or plan out the cut and pattern of your next pair of 
pantaloons. When I was sawing off my board ends 
under my oak in A.D. 188-3 (as time is now some- 
what ridiculously computed, though we know the 
earth is millions of years older, no offence here being 
offered to the Christian calendar), when I say I was 
sawing off board ends and wondering and speculating 
whether or no the Democrats would astonish them- 
selves and elect a President, I generally sawed them 
askew and awry and on a diagonal pattern, if not 
- : and ten to one. if not in so doing, I absent- 
mindedly used my rip saws instead of the cross-cut, 
which, of course, as every lady knows who uses buck 
and other saws, is the saw to saw a board's end off, in- 
I of sawing it through the middle. I suffered so 
much in body as well as mind, through hammer bang- 
ing of thumb and lingers, sawing boards crooked and 
tumbling over things, as well as myself, because 
through original sin and the habit of a life-time, my 
mind and thought would go straying off on the 
thing I proposed to do rather than on the thing I 



22 



was at the time doing, that in order to cure and relieve 
myself of so much suffering, I painted in Letters of 
lamp-black and turpentine on all sides of the house. 
these mottoes : •• Take time for all things." " Do but 
one thing at a time." And vet in the very act of bo 
painting, I forgol my own moral and what I was 
about, and painted one letter half an inch above or 
below the line of another ; because, while painting, the 
force I used to handle tin- brush with, was off and 
away in some place ten or a thousand miles distant : 
and it' it was there, how could it do the work here? 



CHAPTER VI. 

WHAT IS OWNERSHIP? 

I own this badly-constructed, fifty-dollar house in 
the Jersey swamp. Very Pew people own the houses 
they live in as thoroughly as I do mine. Oftener the 
houses own them. I dominate this house largely. 

I can. if I wish, set it on fire. There are no neigh- 
bors within sight, whose property would thereby be 
endangered. 

I live in no town or village, whose inhabitants 
would be alarmed at my conflagration, and who 
would annoy me by trying to put it out. Fifty 
dollars' worth of rough lumber would soon burn up. 
I can cut holes anywhere through my walls, without 
asking permission of a landlord. I can fill the place 
with smoke, without fear of troubling other tenants. 
I ran arise at midnight, drive nails, saw wood, or 
indulge in any other noisy employment, without the 
fear hanging over me and fretting me that I am dis- 
turbing somebody's rest. I can leave my slippers as 
I took them off, the toe of one pointing north and the 
other south, and find them a week afterward, on my 
return, in the same position, and not hidden in the 
most obscure corner by the troublesome chamber- 
maid. I fear not to leave mud on my own carpet. 
I am not tied to stated meal hours. I am not 
harassed by the possibility of unwelcome callers. 

23 



24 



My faults, whatever they arc here within these four 
walls, trouble no one but myself. I own and have 
the exclusive right to my hallway. I can bring gro- 
ceries and parcels myself to my OWD front door. I 

fear no janitor. I am not obliged to conceal a beer 

pitcher under my coat, and slip out by him with tear 
and trembling, if I want beer, because beer at this 
flat is allowed to he brought in at the front door. 
I am dominated by no landlady, who grumbles it' I 
eat a peanut in the room, and Leave a shell on the 
floor. I can drive all sizes of nails into the walls. I 
can paste pictures on those walls, or paint them in all 
colors, if I choose. I can keep a menagerie in the 
house, without fear of any other tenant's complaint. 
Butchers and grocers do not litter my hallway with 
their advertising circulars. There is no couple resi- 
dent on a floor above, whose quarrels or Caudle lec- 
tures fall down at night through the elevator-shaft 
into my ears. 1 am tormented by no neighbor's culi- 
nary smells. I have no printed landlord's ordinance 
staring me perpetually in the face, warning me with 
pains and penalties if I throw coffee-grounds down 
the drain-pipes. If water falls on my floor there is 
no horror of its leaking to the floor below, loosening 
plaster and damaging furniture. 

I have no servant to play the domestic spy. grum- 
ble at the butter, entertain her relatives at my ex- 
pense, break the best china, and he found drunk on 
the stairs. But Diogenes owned his tun. and could 
roll it away from a disagreeable neighborhood, roll it 
in the sun in winter, the shade in summer, and away 
from the river when it was rising. And he was richer 



than even I am. What is ownership? Is ii paying 
for something whose use musl be regulated by other 
people's opinions or habits? How many people, in a 
sense, own the clothes they wear? Do I own a pair 
o( hoots, which so pinch and torture me thai I take 
them o\'\' so soon as I am out o{ other people's sight, 
or is it the fashionable public w hich owns these boots, 
and forces me to wear them? Do I own a standing 
collar, which tries to cut my throat at every turn of 
my head, or the fashionable public? Do I own my- 
self, or am I housed, fed, and dressed according to 
the desire or whim of certain people whom I feel 
I must imitate, or be nothing? 

1 saw a woman the other day going home from a 
shopping excursion, and carrying laboriously six 
bundles. I saw anxiety in her face and weariness in 
her arms. When she stepped into the street car. it 
was with fear lest a package should drop. When 
she sat down, it was to distribute bundles in front 
and on either side of her. and then count to see that 
none were missing. If, on the trip, she lapsed into 
momentary forgetfulness, she awoke with a start to 
the sense of her burthen of many bundles, and the 
fear that one might have been stolen. When she 
got out, she was still passing through this ordeal and 
trial of bundles. Yet those bundles contained arti- 
which she had bought because they pleased her 
fancy. Xo sooner had she bought them, no sooner 
had she. as she imagined, acquired proprietorship 
over them, than they captured and enslaved her. 
This was on a Saturday night. 1 have no doubt that 
some of those bundles wavlaid her on her wav to 



26 

church, held possession of more or Less of her soul, 
and absorbed some of her devotions. I speak in full 
Bympath} with this poor woman, for I have many 
times been so captured by bundles myself , — bundles 
of petty caics. bundles of imaginary wants, bundles 
of borrowed troubles, and bundles of vain imagin- 
ings. What a load of care sin- carried home in those 
bundles. There were "things to make up." lint 
the dressmaker did not come according to appoint- 
ment. Care Dumber one. When she did come she 
fitted the dress badly. Trouble two. When she 

finished the work she charged more than was ex- 
pected. Trouble three. When the dress was finished 
it was necessary to ask her husband tor more money. 
Trouble lour. Nor was it finished in time for the 
party. Trouble live. Did the poor woman own her 
dress? Did it own her'/. In building my house, I 
allowed at one time the lumber to own me. because 
it was not delivered in time, and I worried over it. 
I was owned by my two second-hand window sashes, 
because they were delayed three days on a freight 
train. I feel many things owning or trying to own 
me now. So soon as they usurp my mind, and I 
commence worrying ahoiit them. I know they own 
me. When 1 am hurrying and worrying to finish 
my lien-coop by tomorrow night, that hen-coop owns 
me. When I don't care " a darn " whether the hen- 
coop is finished this week or not. I own the hen-coop. 
I once saw a man whose house was burning, and not 
insured, sit down and enjoy the conflagration and 
village uproar, and whistle. •• What can't be cured 

must be endured.*" That man owned the house still. 



CHAPTER VII. 

RELIGION IN OUR WORK. 

The obstacles I have to encounter in building and 
running my single-guest hotel, are aoi so much of the 
outside as in myself. I am generally in too great a 

hurry. I insist on things being done before they are 
done. I fix my time in which things shall be done, 
and am very impatient when the Almighty insists on 
his time for doing them. 

Why should so many acts of my life be to me irk- 
some and uncomfortable ? Why is dressing, when I 
arise at morn, an unpleasant and hurried task? Why 
should I pitch on my clothing as if a fire were threat- 
ening my house? 

Why should starting the fire in my stove be such 
an irksome task? Why may I not arrange the kin- 
dling wood carefully, not to say reverentially, put 
some mind on it, and dispose it in such fashion that 
when ignited, it shall burn to best advantage ? May 
there not be a sinful way and righteous way of mak- 
ing a tire ? Are not our faculties given us by the 
Creator to be used to best advantage in every act? 



& 



y 



Does real religion indorse carelessness ? Should not 
religion be a matter permeating, imbuing, and in- 
fluencing every act in life ? Why do I bestow two 
or three times the strength necessary in pulling on 
my shoes, and tire myself as much as by an hour's 

27 



28 



work, when a Little patience, a little skill, a Little 
mind thrown on the adjustment of the fool to the 
.shoe, will make it Blip on bo much easier"/ I arise 
sometimes exhausted, even at the fresh day's com- 
mencement, from a five-minutes' tussle with these 
shoes, all through sheer stupidity. I have expended 
on them, through this impatience, a certain amount of 
strength which might, if carefully used, have brought 
me pleasure. Is not this ;i sin'/ Who gave nie this 
Strength? Is the pulling on of shoes a matter all 
outside the pale of religion ? 

Look at my clothes in this room. Flung about 
wickedly, disposed unrighteously, two places for 
every one article, and the only place for it where it 
happens now to be. Is this religion*/ Why am I 
often so long dressing in the morning*/ Because 1 
cannot find a BOCk? Where is it found, after a ten- 
minutes' search*/ Behind my trunk or behind my 
bed, where, last night, I impiously flung it. disre- 
garding tin- injunction, " What thou doest, do with 
all thy might." But I flung it with all my might — 
somewhere. Is that the application of the text*/ 
May it not mean that in pulling off and disposing of 
that Mick. I should for ever so little time have l»e- 
stowed on it all my might of care and attention, so 
that I could, to a certainty, have put my hand on it 
in the morning, and saved that ten-minutes' strength, 
used iii looking after it. for other uses? How vast 
is th< gate of force I wast-' through thes* 

called trivial neglects. Worse still, the slovenly act 
has become the fixed habit, tin* second nature. I am 
appalled in the endeavor to reform to find that it 



■Mi 



extends down to the tying of my shoe-strings. I find 
it cropping out when I put coal in the stove, or water 
in the tea-kettle. I pour the coal in irreverentially 
and carelessly. Some goes into the stove, some on 
it. some over it on the floor. So with the tea-kettle; 
1 pour some water in the vessel and more or less out, 
because I insist on regarding it as an irksome act. 
It is one I wish to be through with as quickly as 
sible. I make it a sin. because I refuse to bestow 
on the pouring, care and attention. The sin brings 
its punishment in the very doing. The punishment 
is the sense of pain, through impatience. It is pun- 
ishment, too, with compound interest, for I must be 
at the additional labor of picking up my needles>lv 
scattered eoal, or wiping up the tea-kettle's slop-over. 
More strength is wasted. What though I " profess " 
ten thousand religions, shall I e\ev be happy if I keep 
on in this way? What says the apostle: ''Let all 
things be done decently and in order." Is the filling 
of stoves with coal, or tea-kettles with water, outside 
the bounds of " all things to be done decently, and 
in order?" Is it not the Creator's coal? Is it not 
his water ? Is it not, in a sense, the Creator's tea- 
kettle? Is not the earth's the Lord's, and the ful- 
ness thereof ? How am I using all these gifts of the 
Lord's ? Do I yet know how to use them ? 

What am I after on this planet ? Happiness. Very 
well. How is it promised? By serving the Lord. 
May not the Lord be served in the performance of 
the so-called trivial acts of life? Yonder on my table 
are my few unwashed dishes. Shall I allow them to 
remain in that fashion, offending my eye, through 



30 



a ? [fi imt cleanliness nexl to erod- 
Liness? But in what fashion and frame of mind 

shall I cleanse them? shall I hurry and scrabble 
through the performance? Shall I make it a duty 1 
<>r a pleasure? shall I cleanse that plate with the 

same care and attention I would bestow on painting 
a picture, were I aide to paint 7 Shall I feel a cer- 
tain sense of gratification, when, through my efforts, 
it appears once more a (dean plate'/ Is not this 
worship'/ rs worship pain, or pleasure ? What 
the apostle'/ "Rejoice evermore!" Why not re- 
joice, then, in making a plate (dean? Or shall I 
wash it with fretting, hurry, impatience, and curses, 
Berving the devil while I wash, leaving dabs and 
specks of dried egg yolk on the rim, and finally wip- 
ing it half washed, and soiling unnecessarily my 
wiping towel, all serving as the little ways and means 
to contribute further to my unhappiness? 

Why have I no appointed place for my wash-ri 
Why does that lone, lorn, lost wash-rag, always lying 
about, always in the way. always to he put some- 
where out of the way of something else, and where it 
doesn't belong, why has it become an eye sore? 
Why each time that I regard it, does it give me pain ? 
Why does it lie a weight on my brain? Because I 
am a sinner. Because J am too lazy to set apart a 
lew minutes' time, and appoint it one certain, defined, 
convenient place. Because I refuse to allow my re- 
ligion to include that wash-rag. Because I am ••de- 
spising the day of small things." Because I will sin 
and fall from grace daily, in not. by that wash-rag. 
doing •• things decently and in order." Now. indeed. 
I know why I am the " chief among sinners." 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE CARES OF MY WORLD. 

Despite all I can do, the " cares of the \\ orld " will 
invade the house of refuge I have built for myself 
in this Jersey swamp, of which a very large portion 
are not worth being cares at all. They run thus: 

Whether I shall have my leaky roof covered with 
tin. or cover it myself with tarred paper or oil-cloth ; 
whether I shall put up some more shelves in a cer- 
tain corner, for what purpose I don't exactly know ; 
whether I had better for next summer buy the 17.50 
handsome nickel-plated oil-stove, or a common tin 
one. or no oil-stove at all : whether I shall buy a hoe, 
or borrow one of my neighbor; whether I shall plant 
corn or potatoes ; who will care for my chickens and 
pigeons when I go to Boston : whether I shall have 
time at the barber's to get my hair cut, before the 
train starts for town ; whether this spring, I shall 
buy a seven or nine dollar pair of pantaloons; 
whether, after all, I had, or had not, better hold on 
to the old spring overcoat ; whether I shall buy a 
six-dollar umbrella, or make a sixty-five-cent one an- 
swer ; whether I shall have toast for breakfast, or egg 
and toast ; whether, in a thousand things of every- 
day thought, which I am indeed ashamed to tell 
any one else, I shall or shall not, or could or should 
not, or might or might not — all these thoughts, plans, 

31 



speculations, wishes, anxieties, whims, notions, great 
and small, needless or necessary, often come in a 
crowd and mob my brain, within the space of half an 
hour, while I am trudging from the swamp to the 
station, while Deity is doing his best to amuse me, by 
the splendors of a sunrise. 

Then how] travel back and forth on this can 
the world track : how time and again I return to the 
same old care, anxiety, plan, whim, or speculation; 
how, rather than dismiss any one of this crowd of 
importunate intruders, not one-tenth of whom I can 
do justice to or dispose of. I allow myself continually 
to l>e bored by them: how I give evasive answers 
and deal out indecisions, instead of deciding at once 
and for the day: how I say. "I'll see how I 
about the new broom when I get to the store." or 
"Maybe I'll net a new spring overcoat and maybe I 
won't," saying to the demand. ** Call again pie, 
which it does three minutes afterwards: and how I 
will persist in seeing my hens unfed, uncared for. and 
starving, when I am in Boston. 

Possibly, -Martha's mind was " cumbered with much 
serving"" in a similar way. It may not matter what 
the serving is about, whether a pot-lid of eighteen 
hundred years ago to be scoured cleaner, or the pro- 
jected pantaloons of 1884. Possibly. Mary "chose 
the better part." not in slighting her employments, 
whatever they may have been, but in refusing to be 
mobbed and usurped by them. I am never secure 
against invasion and assault from these care-. Y.- — 
terday I went to the city in a serene and complacent 
frame of mind. It was the first genuine spring day 



38 



of the year. The elements were in their gentlest mood. 
I followed their lead. I walked Leisurely up Chambers 
Street, had my boots blacked by an Italian novice, 
who evidently did n't know his trade, fell momentarily 
indignant at the miserable apology for the ••shine" he 
put on them, repented thereof, called up charity and 
consideration for the poor fellow, trying to earn an 
honest living, put myself in his place, felt better, paid 
him, walked off with a pair of boots unequally 
polished, congratulated myself on my goodness, filled 
myself up with spiritual pride, boasted to myself that 
I was a good fellow, and not as the hard-hearted, in- 
considerate sinners all about me. Men went by me 
full of business cares, doubts, and fears, working, 
scheming, planning, rushing, as is their daily wont, 
their faces tied up in hard, financial knots, their neck- 
ties awry, from lack of time to adorn properly them- 
selves, their legs going with all the might of their 
bodies, their minds hurrying their legs, and goading 
those members ever into a quicker trot, their whole 
souls and beings absorbed, apparently, and captured 
by the "cares of the world." I said to myself. "I 
am not as one of these sinners. I am above these 
things ; I am not to be waylaid and captured by the 
c cares of the world.' I am contented, happy, and 
rich in the enjoyment of the hour." 

" Let him that standeth take heed lest he fall." 
Of course I was mistaken. I did not know my- 
self ; I never did. I have been trying these forty-nine 
years, to get acquainted with that individuals inside 
of me. I have time and again imagined I knew him 
through and through, and found myself mistaken. 



M 



Some iu'\v feature, some new fault, or some old fault 
in a oew dress, is ever cropping out. I think some- 
times there are half a dozen fellows wrapped lip in- 
side of my skin, each with his peculiar whims, cranks, 

notions, vagaries, desires, and appetites, and each 
demanding, like sailors in port, a "day's liberty ' 
shore. I despair of ever getting acquainted with the 
whole menagerie. 

Serene, complacent, and thus imagining myself 
beyond the ••cares of this world," with naught to do 
but enjoy creation, and ••rejoice evermore" with the 
apostle. I was suddenly seized with a desire to occupy 
the remaining hour of my proposed stay in the city, 
by going for a trumpery mahogany, brass-bound 
writing desk. I had left at the loom I occupy occa- 
sionally in town. I have no need of this box in my 
swamp retreat. I don't know exactly what to do 
with it. It would have been perfectly secure at the 
room in the city. I shall probably, next winter, be 
obliged to lug it back, from New Jersey t<> New 
York. It was a passing fancy of mine, or that of 
one of the other fools inside of me. It was not only 
a fancy, but also one of the "cares of the world." 
It captured me. bound me. hurried me to the City 
Hall elevated road station, drove me up the stairs 
like mad, to catch a train, and drove me out again at 
the other end of the road. It rushed me. all tangled 
up in a mob of other prisoners, more or less enslaved 
by the ••cares of the world."' on the up-town South 
Ferry train. Arriving at ray room. I found 1 had 
half an hour less than I had counted on forgetting 
back in time to take the half-past three afternoon 



:',:> 



train, which carries me to my swamp. There was no 
real necessity that I should have taken that particular 

train, save the necessity of whim. Thai was another 
needless •• care of the world." Nothing would have 
been damaged, nobody would have been hurt or dis- 
appointed, and all creation would have remained in 
statu (fiio had I taken any one of the many trains 
running to the swamp after half-past three. Impa- 
tience and hurry now possessed me. I " tore round." 
In wrapping up the box, I could find no twine. I 
rushed down three long stairways, and to the grocer's 
to get some, rushed up again, of course, wrestled 
with the desk, and in tying it, hurriedly made it, 
thereby, my foe, putting obstacles continually in my 
way. I scratched my fingers against the brass 
handles, perspired, swore internally, was angry with 
everything, boiled with fret and fume, broke the strap 
by which I intended to carry it, soiled my clothes, 
lugged it out and to the elevated road station, 
climbed the wrong stairway, waited ten minutes for 
a train, which, when it came, was bound to Harlem, 
instead of the City Hall; lugged the accursed thing 
down the up-town stairs, and up the down-town 
stairs, waited more uneasy minutes for another train, 
got to Chambers Street five minutes too late, and 
found myself wearied, out of temper, and with two 
hours of time on my hands, and twenty pounds of 
writing desk, until the starting of the five minutes 
past five afternoon express. 

Wk Let him that standeth take heed lest he fall." I 
had fallen — fallen from grace, tempted by a lure of 
the world, and an imaginary one, at that. I was rich 



36 



just before the thing tempted me — rich in having 
for the time nothing to do, and plenty of time to do 

it in: rich in a contented mood and a quiet spirit ; 
rich in caring for naught save what was then and 
there going on outside of me, before my eyes, and 
inside of me, as my eyes jotted these goings-on down 
in my brain: Is not this wealth ? Can my brother, 
Jay Gould, of whom all men. or nearly all men, 
through sheer envy, speak so ill — can he enjoy more ? 
Do millions in hank insure a contented spirit? But 
is money alone at the bottom of the "cares of this 
world"? There was no money in that writing-desk, 
and I expended at least three dollars' worth of 
Strength, thought, and anxiety over it. Do the 
"cares of the world" embrace ball dresses not 
finished in time, ostrich feathers out of curl, gilt 
binding worn off of prayer-books? Do the cares of 
the world ever enter a church sadly in debt, a church 
needing a new coat of paint, a church with a rickety 
steeple, or a worn-out minister, who will not take the 
hint that his flock have long ceased to "call " him? 
What business is this of mine? Have I not all I can 
do, and more, to resist the cares of my world? Do I 
not almost daily, when I think myself one that stand- 
eth, suddenly find myself toppling over, and falling 
from grace ? 



CHAPTER IX. 

THAT HIGH SHELF. 

In building a house and planning its internal ar- 
rangement, especially where it is a house of but one 
room, and I alone do all the living in it, I am led 
into the study of having everything so situated that 
it can be reached with the least possible outlay of 
time and strength. A man wants to hold all the 
strength which nature gives him. Strength means 
enjoyment of life, and in the daily acts of life it pays 
to regulate its expenditure by as rigid a system of 
economy as would govern a man in a foreign country, 
when reduced to his last hundred dollars. When 
I go tired to the civilized house, time on time have I 
sought long for my slippers, and found them at last, 
thrust far under the bed by the chambermaid, or put 
in the recesses of some closet. Consider the force 
used up' in hunting for those slippers. It's one's 
very life. Hunt the slipper, under these conditions, 
becomes a serious matter. Yesterday I reduced the 
height of my washstand six inches ; because, when I 
wash face and hands. I want to sit down. I want to 
do it seriously, carefully, reverentially, and get some 
enjoyment out of it. Why must I stand on my feet 
before the washstand, and so expend force uselessly'/ 
Who contrived these washstands that require people 
to stand before them? Probably somebody who 

37 



38 



deemed this Lavatory process only a matter of neces- 
sity, of personal duty, and an irksome piece of busi- 
0688. Should this be so? Why should not every 

art in life, DO matter how trivial, be made one of en- 
joyment ? What is the source of ennui, and weary 
waiting lor time to pass. 1 > 1 1 1 this slurring over and 
hurrying through of so many of life's so-called trivial 
affairs'/ How can a man praise his Creator, and all 
his works, when he is making a hard job out of some 
requirement of his body, which is said to he the 
"dwelling of the spirit"? Isn't it a kind of sacri- 
lege? 

I find in general household arrangement a tendency 
to cause the greatest outlay of strength with the 
least profitable results. In small family kitchens, the 
pots, pans, and other cooking utensils will he some- 
times kept in a closet fifteen feet from the stov 
range, and so disposed therein, that half a dozen 
articles must be moved before the one wanted can 
be taken out. Things are hung up near the door, or 
near the ceiling. The worker must stoop or stretch 
like a giraffe, to reach the desired object. Tons of 
human strength are lost daily in the aggregate, 
through high shelves. Perhaps you may have noticed 
that when any article is placed on a shelf higher than 
the average human head, it stays there a long time. 
And why? Because yon shrink involuntarily from 
looking for anything placed on a high shelf. You 
feel the irksomeness of the act in your bones. 
Thousands of things that people want, and have long 
been looking for. and wondering who took them, or 
where they've gone to. are now lying peaceful and 



89 



dusty on the high shelf. Did you ever observe how 
troublesome an article becomes in your kitchen, or 
your bedroom, thai you have no use for at present, 

and DO place for, and which is always lying round in 
the way? It may be a book, or an empty paper box 
you brought home some costly trash in from a shop- 
ping foray, or a satchel, for which you have no time. 
and are too lazy even to find a certain place for. You 
find it always on something you want. You take it 
off. and put it on something else you will want in 
about five minutes. You are bothered by the con- 
founded thing, yet you hardly know it is that which 
bothers you. 

It's the thing always to be moved out of another 
thing's way, and then put in the way of some other 
thing. Perchance, if you hang it up, you hang it 
over two or three other articles — garments on 
clothes hooks, male or female garments, as your case 
may be. You will be sure to want one or more of 
these garments next, and then off comes the satchel 
without " fixed habitation" from that hook, and on 
another, and over more things, of course. Finally you 
get out of patience with it, and sling it up on the 
high shelf, and wonder, when you want it next week, 
where it has gone. Surely these things are so. I have 
suffered myself from them most of my life, and all for 
cause of having so few fixed places for anything, 
and for having so many unfixed things in every other 
thing's place. 

Maybe you are a great statesman, or a great law- 
yer, or a great man of some sort, or think you are, 
which amounts to the same thing, and is just as good 



40 



in the end. You think these matters I am talking 
about, too trivial for your notice. Yon are BO far 

above them. Hut you know you have, when it is 
all summed up in a Lump, spent hours on hours, if 
not days, hunting for your penknife, or lead pencil, 
hunting first in one breeches pocket and then in the 
other, and next going through your vest, and then 
your coat, and hack to the breeches pocket again, 
and this always at some critical and important junct- 
ure. Was it not then that all the strength of your 
mighty mind was absorbed and poured out, not on 
the plan whereby you expected to move the world, 
but in wondering, fretting, and stewing over the loss 
of that knife, pencil, or spectacles, which you found 
a few minutes later, under a sheet of paper? 



CHAPTER X. 

A PLACE FOR EVERYTHING. 

One of the greatest troubles in my house, is the 
endeavor to carry out the law, "A place for every- 
thing, and everything in its rjlace." I am afflicted 
with a tendency to have two, three, sometimes a 
dozen, places for the same thing. Mine over my 
domestic utensils is still an incompetent governor- 
ship. I appoint places for things, but forget the 
] daces. 1 hang my frying-pan on six different nails. 
Again, I bring in things, as helps, to the domestic 
economy, and do not appoint them places at all. A 
cup, a spoon, a rag, a bottle, even a tack, with no 
tixed habitation, is sure to be in the way of some 
other article, perhaps a dozen articles, and hence 
comes to be in a chronic state of rebellion against the 
household peace. 

The more things with no set places, the greater the 
war, and the harder it is to put down the rebellion. 
There is one particular spoon, an iron cooking spoon, 
between which, and myself, a lively quarrel has been 
going on, for the last two weeks. Half a dozen times 
have I given it a fixed place, and then forgotten the 
nail on which it should hang. The result is, it hangs 
everywhere. When not hanging everywhere, it is 
lying around everywhere. It is a culinary Ishmael. 
It has no fixed use. I have forgotten what 1 did 

41 



4^ 



Bet it apart for. I( is now a tramp in the house. 
There is an empty glass jar in a similar state of 
vagrancy and rebellion. 

I have Dot given it any occupation, or any fixed 
station. Consequently it is forever wandering over 
the house, now here, now there, and in more or less 
difficulty with all the peaceful and orderly jars, 

w Inch have a business to look after, are minding their 

business, and want to be let alone. 

One cause of this trouble is my tendency to 
and accumulate all soils of things, lor which, at the 
time of getting, I have no defined use. J have a. 
wonderful and covetous eye. 1 am, when in town, 
always seeing things, and saying to myself, "That's 
a good thing to have/' It may be a tub, a table, a 
teapot, a cup, a tin pail, a second-hand chair, a car- 
pet, anything, everything. "A good tiling to have." 
Have for what? J don't know. I refuse to press 
that question home. I dare not. I evade, at such 
times, my more thoughtful and considerate self. If I 
see him coming, I run round the corner. The fact is, 
1 want the needless thing simply for the pleasure of 
getting it. It is an instinct for accumulation horn in 
me. Perhaps I was once a magpie, and revelled in 
heaps of old hones, rags, aixl scraps. I bring my 
treasure home, which I have bought only for the 
pleasure of buying. Then comes the trouble. It 
must be cared for. It must have a place made fur it. 
It must be washed, or dusted, or moved. Or it may 
get broken, and bring grief to my soul. It must in 
some way occupy some portion of my mind, and in 
such occupation it is certain, at some time or other, to 



43 



demand some portion of such mental strength as 

nature lias given me. 

The article I have no use for, becomes almost im- 
mediately a castaway, a household pest, and vagrant. 
It must in any case be " stored" — otherwise put in 
confinement. Jails of this description may be found 
in thousands of cellars and garrets, where the broken 
chairs, and tables, the old pots, pans, and old carpets. 
and all. are criminals and useless burdens on some- 
body's mind. 

There is a heap of these castaways in a corner of 
my room. A basket I have no use for, a large tin 
box, a small one, a pile of old papers, a pot-lid bereft 
of its pot, an onion which has joined this disorganized 
rebellion, two potatoes, now alternately freezing and 
thawing, a cast-off pair of pantaloons, an old satchel, 
a lamp-shade, which I am keeping for the day when 
its affinity, a new lamp exactly its measure, shall 
come to join it ; and in the crevices of this pile, are 
bits of rope, string, rags, nails, and tacks. That pile 
gives me a qualm every time I look at it. 

Because the heap is not only in that corner. It 
lies also on my mind. It is in my brain. It weighs 
heavily there. So do the tramp spoons, cups, and 
jars, about the house. It would be more profitable 
to destroy them. I have a trunk half full of old 
clothes. What ami keeping them for? Economy. 
To wear them out some time or other. Meantime, 
they are wearing me out. Three or four times a 
week do I visit that trunk, to look for something 
which may or may not be there, and in that looking, 
in rummaging, and turning over those old clothes, I 



44 



spend many vexatious minutes, and no small amount 
of strength. The question is, "Are they worth it?* 1 
I lift a pair of old pantaloons out of that trunk 
twenty-five times a year, lay them on the floor, lay 
them l>ack again, do the same to an old vest, ditto to 

a linen duster I haven'1 worn for four years, and 
may never wear again, ditto to three or four elianges 
of under-clothing which are in an enfeebled and 

doubtful condition : and alter spending all this time 
and strength, I shall eventually throw the articles 
one by one away, or open at intervals a minute crack 
in my stingy heart, and give a coat to a beggar, who 
will pawn it for beer, while I return home and hug 
myself for my generosity, in so disposing of a thing 
which annoyed me ; or I may sell the lot to a pedler, 
and lumber my house with his cheap trash in exchange. 
Had I not better hold an inquest now over these un- 
used articles, and throw away, or give away, all that 
I have no use. or can see no use for? Shall I not. in 
so doing, clear my mind of a load, as well as the 
trunk? I want to get all these articles not needed 
for the immediate future, off my mind. When off, 
perhaps better things may come in. 

The moral I draw from this strictly for my own 
use (believing that all morals are the better for being 
home-made, and for home use) is. never to have 
more things in sight (ornaments excepted), than I 
have use for some time within the next fortnight. 

But shall the moral stop here with me"/ How 
much useless lumber of fact, opinion, event, dates. 
and the like is there in my mind which I have no use 
for now, and may never have? 



45 



Is there a day coming, when it may be said, "Suffi- 
eienl for t lie day is the knowledge thereof"? Musi 
I. to be wise, know every possible Fact, event, and 
opinion, perhaps false, in advance? 

How much and how many of all these daily events, 
incidents, persons, things, and minutiae of life gener- 
ally is it best to hold in one's mind? How much is 
it profitable to recollect? How much is it profitable 
to forget ? 

What if I knew the names of all the rivers in the 
world, their length, the principal mountains, and 
their heights, the names of all islands, capes, lakes, 
and seas, the boundaries of all empires, kingdoms, 
states, counties, townships, and election precincts? 
Well? I am valuable as a walking register, almanac, 
encyclopaedia, and time-table. 

Did you ever notice that the people who are 
crammed with facts, who can tell the beginning and 
end of everything, where it comes from, how it is 
made, where it is kept, and where it is going to, who 
are peripatetic knowledge-boxes, rifles set with hair 
triggers, shooting off fact and information at the 
least touch, and dangerous for this very reason, to 
approach, are apt to be the people lacking in execu- 
tive ability, and with all their so-called knowledge, 
are generally found occupying subordinate positions? 
Is it because their brains carry too great a weight of 
tilings which are of no use to them at present, and 
leave no strength for the employment of other facul- 
ties? Is it really necessary that I know everything, 
or anything, until a time comes that I require such 
knowledge? When I own a horse, and he falls sick, 



46 



it will be time for me to find out where the horse- 

doctor lives. Bui I do not own a horse now, and 
the horse I do not own may not he sick, and I don't 
know where the horse-doctor lives, nor do I care to 
burden myself in finding out, or my memory after- 
wards, with the effort to recollect his address. 

I have seen those rough, illiterate fellows, who in 
the usual sense M had no education," and regarded 
with reverence a man who could quote a Latin sen- 
tence, taking contracts for building grand loads over 
the Sierras, and carrying them out, employing thou- 
sands of men, provisioning them, and using the brains 
of educated engineers, and other craftsmen as they 
would tools. When they wanted a fact, or a tool, or 
a man skilled in a certain calling, they went for the 
article, secured it, used it, and when finished dropped 
it. 

I don't need two pot-lids for one pot. One will 
be in the way. I don't want to wear three pairs of 
pantaloons at once, necessary as are these articles. 
Shall I go on putting joint on joint to my stove-pipe, 
stove-piping Pelion on Ossa, length on length, till it 
pierces high heaven, because it's a good thing to 
have a stove-pipe? How much of my youthful book 
cramming at school has been extra stove-pipe knowl- 
edge? What has it really profited me to know that 
Columbus discovered America in 1492? Did it ever 
get me a situation, or into good society? Did it re- 
fine me? Did it make me more moral, or honest? 
Did it improve my digestion'/ Did it recommend 
me as a good, reliable person, to any human being'/ 
Could I travel on this choice bit of history? Could 



] get ten rents credit on the strength of it? Did it 
make me a better judge of human nature/ 

What, after all, has it been to me but a useless 
joint of historical stove-pipe, taking needless strength 
to keep it from being blown over'/ I low many 
thousand years, if the earth lasts so long, and there 
are people on it, will it be necessary for the child to 
learn that Columbus discovered America in 14 ( .»2? 
Besides, in after years, I found that even this joint 
of stove-pipe was unsound. Columbus did not first 
discover America. I read that the Northmen did, 
ral hundred years before. Then the Indians 
found the continent before the Northmen, and it may 
yet transpire that the Egyptians did. 

1 am willing to be amused by all these histories, 
records, traditions, speculations, and theories. But 
to make of them serious subjects for stud}', to feel 
eompelled to remember them, to run panic-stricken 
to history once a year, to ascertain if it really was a 
date known as 1492. when Columbus rediscovered 
America ; to feel myself such an ignoramus for not 
remembering how those four numbers should stand 
in line, seems to me something like laying in extra 
stove-pipe joints, pot-lid covers, and dust-pans, when 
one may answer the required purpose for years. 

Is the mind a magazine, a rag-bag, a closet under 
the stairs, to be filled full of odds and ends of infor- 
mation? Or is it a mirror, to be polished so that it 
shall reflect in itself all that is, more and more 
clearly? And if so, is the polishing process to be 
like the cramming process? 



CHAPTER XI. 

A TUSSLE WITH A TREE. 

I imagined it would take me about half an hour 
to put up some boxes, for the accommodation of the 
bluebirds, amid the branches of the magnificent oak 

which stands in the rear of my house. 

This oak is the pride of my estate. It is erect, 
lofty, symmetrical, dow in its fullest vigor, a temple 

not built with hands, more marvellous in construc- 
tion than any palace ever erected, and, in my brother 
man's estimation, good chiefly for firewood or rail- 
road ties. 

In the endeavor to place the bird-houses on it, I 
find that perversity dwells among its branches. Or 
perhaps, its desire is not to be meddled with in any 
way, — a feature of strong character, and marked 
individuality, whether in men, women, or oaks. 

I wanted to put the boxes on the oak, about twenty 
feet from the ground. I erected a ladder against the 
tree. The tree refused to allow the ladder to 
solidly against its massive trunk. Whichever way 1 
directed that ladder, it fell against small, but stout, 
branches, stout as steel springs. These fought the 
ladder, and warded it off against too near approach. 

I tried to insinuate the ladder between these 
crabbed, obstinate, little branches. They resisted 
intelligently all such tactics. Where the ladder's 
48 



49 



edged in a little on one side, a cat's daw of a branch 
managed to catch it on the other. Meantime I 
myself, the human, moving machine at the ladder's 
foot, was expending much force in these vain efforts. 
For it was an old, and very heavy ladder — a lionse- 
painter's ladder. 

I saw that I must cut these branches off. I could 
not reach them from the ground so to do. Nor could 
I saw them off by getting on the ladder, as it leaned 
against them, since to do this might be to saw myself 
off. in a sense. The axe failed to cut them off, be- 
cause I could not get in a position to deal an effec- 
tive blow. I had recourse to a hand-saw. I would 
saw from the top of my step-ladder. 

Posting the step-ladder at the foot of the tree 
proved another difficult operation, for the ground 
was uneven, and it was necessary to level off a place 
to erive the base a secure hold. 

At this time, it occured to me that I was a long 
way off from placing those bluebird boxes. Every 
move thus developed and necessary in this under- 
taking, seemed to carry me farther from the aim first 
sought — that of nailing the boxes to the tree. I had 
commenced with the endeavor to place a ladder 
against the trunk, found mind and body intercepted 
by those obstinate branches: had left the branches, 
and now found myself at work with a pick and 
shovel on the ground. I thought to myself : " I won- 
der how far I must travel away from those boxes in 
this fashion in order to get them. Is this one of 
those affairs in life, seemingly so easy of accomplish- 
ment, really so difficult, which looks as if it could be 



50 



done in a day, and which may require years/ At all 

events, the affair is assuming the aspect of a sort of 
game, Or rather Combat, between myself and this 
tree, and I 'm going to drop all hurry and anxiety to 
place the boxes, and see which of ns. myself or the 
tree, are t<> he musters of the situation. 

The Step-ladder sided with the tree, and was 

unreasonably particular in getting a level base, now 
toppling as I stood on it. over en this side, now on 
that, in a decrepit, helpless soil of fashion. It was a 

striking example, in its seeming efforts to overturn 

me. of what a friend calls "the total depravity of in- 
animate things." 

At last I mounted the ladder, and commenced op- 
erations with the saw. on branch number one. The 
branch being green, and full of sap, the saw stuck, 
and hung in an obstinate manner. Being on the 
top board of the step-ladder, my footing was shaky 
and uncertain. I sawed, worried by the thought of 
a possible broken neck, or leg. and experienced great 
wear and tear of mind and body, in consequence. 
Branch number two required a change of location for 
the step-ladder, and another secure level for its base. 
So did branch number three. By the time the three 
branches were off, I found myself forgetting the 
original intent of all this work, and even wondering, 
at times, what I was working for. 

The branches were at last out of the way. and all 
seemed plain sailing. I raised the heavy ladder 
against the tree. It rested securely against the trunk. 
I mounted it, with one of the boxes in my hands, got 
two-thirds of the way to the ladder's top, heard some- 



:,l 



thing crack ominously, and found thai the left Ladder 
upright had a diagonal split running through it. was 
threatening every instant to pan. and thai my neck 
was in greater danger than ever. I descended rapidly, 

but carefully, from the ladder. Another instance of 
the total depravity of inanimate things. 

There was nothing to do but repair the ladder. 
The placing of the bird-boxes on the tree, had re- 
tired farther in the distance than ever. 1 said then 
to myself: "I wonder where this undertaking will 
carry me, ere it is finished. What new thing shall 
I find necessary to incorporate into this job? Per- 
haps it may bring me to the repairing of my hen-coop. 
It may take me to the city, to get some needed 
article. It may carry me to Europe. I may be 
obliged to consult with lawyers, and jurists, all 
through some indirect operation or development, 
growing out of this bluebird box business. It has 
already cost me two and one-half hours' labor, and I 
expected to accomplish it in thirty minutes.'' But I 
am now prepared for war. I will devote the whole 
day to this undertaking; perchance two whole days. 

I repaired the ladder carefully, nailing braces both 
within and without the broken upright. I placed it 
in position, and mounted it, carrying a bird-box with 
me. Arrived at the ladder's top, I found I could not 
climb the tree to the spot where I desired to nail the 
box. with the box in my hands. So I went down 
the ladder again, and placed the box on the ground. 
Then I went up the ladder so far as it reached, and 
thenceforth took to climbing. More obstacles pre- 
sented themselves. Branches got directly in the 



:>-2 



way. Twigs scratched my lace, and tried to put out 

my eyes. Bits of rotten branches and dry bark dis- 
lodged, and fell into my eyes. There was more cut- 
ting away to be done. I descended the ladder for 

my hatchet, got it. and brimmed a road up the tree. 
All. as I supposed, being ready, I descended again 
for the box. and remounted. It was necessary to 
take with me a hammer, a gimlet, and some nails. 1 
tied the hammer about my neck with a cord, and put 
the nails and gimlet in my vest pocket. Arrived at 
the place where I would nail the box, I found it 
necessary to use the hatchet. Common sense, or a. 
lew seconds" thought, might have taught me that as 
the hatchet would probably be needed again, it should 
have been stuck by the blade in the tree. No. I had 
pitched it from the tree on the ground. So I went 
down the ladder again for the hatchet. 

These continual ascents and descents began now 
to alarm me. They seemed endless, and at the pres- 
ent rate 1 could vaguely see more and more in the 
dim distance of futurity, before the boxes were 
fastened. 

I finished with the hatchet, and was turning the 
current of my thoughts on the hammer, when, that 
instrument being tied, so to speak, by the neck, sud- 
denly as I leaned over a branch, turned a somersault, 
slipped through the knot, and fell straight to the 
ground. It fell wonderfully straight through the 
branches, and on leaching the ground, lay there with 
a dull, sullen, "come-down- from- there-and- pick-me- 
up" expression. 

I did not come down immediately. I leaned over 



53 



the branch and swore at that hammer. Bui it did 

not rise. Then it occurred to me how amusing all 
this might be to any third party, who had nothing to 

do but look on and see the performance. I said : 
M Why should I not be the third party ? " But I re- 
minded myself that the third party had nothing to 

do but sit down and be amused, whereas I had all 
these perpetual ascensions and descensions to make, 
besides being amused. The contract was too large. 
I could not be thoroughly amused, and do all the 
work besides. So I descended again, with what 
patience I could summon. I picked the hammer up. 
I wanted to ring its neck. But what comes from 
ringing a hammer's neck? Naught save the neces- 
sity of buying a new hammer. 

The hammer was picked up, as it desired to be. 
Again I climbed the ladder. In the midst of an ap- 
parently speedy despatch of these labors, a new 
trouble presented itself. The tree had changed its 
tatties, and called a new ally to its aid. 

This ally was a hen — one of my hens. My back 
door and only door had been left open. This hen 
had entered, was on my table consuming the remains 
of my breakfast, and threatening destruction, with 
her awkward legs and claws, to my crockery. It is 
this particular hen that annoys me in this way more 
than all the rest. While they are off foraging in the 
held, she hangs round that back door, bent on thiev- 
ing and plunder. 

I cried out " shoo ! " from above, several times, to 
no purpose. She wouldn't u shoo." She paid me no 
respectful attention whatever. She knew well enough 



54 



she had plenty of time to clear out of the house be- 
fore I could gel down from the tree. I made her 
several threatening remarks. She cocked up one < 
winked at me in a contemptuous manner, and calmly 
went on pecking. I threw several twigs in the house, 
to n<> purpose. I descended the ladder, and wrath- 
ful 1\ drove her out. She went out as hens generally 
do from any pent-up place, by the longest possible 
way, with great risk to window-panes, and fragile 
articles, from her fluttering wings, and with a great 
cackle and outcry, as if she deemed it an outrageous 
proceeding on my part, thus to disturb her while 
peacefully engaged in converting the breakfast scraps 
into fresh eggs for my own use. which cackle and 
outcry was re-echoed by the head roosters of her 
community in the held, as if they, too, concurred, and 
heartily seconded her opinion of me. 

So relinked. I climbed once more the ladder, and 
put myself in position for nailing on the box 
work of some difficulty, since I was obliged to make 
my body conform to the shape and requirements of 
the tree, and the various divergences and contour of 
its trunk and branches. Effecting one position. I 
found that in it I could not strike a blow with the 
hammer, through the interference of a hostile little 
limb. Jn another, I could not pull the nails from my 
vest pocket. I found myself for the work immedi- 
ately in hand, constantly lacking in the requisite num- 
ber of legs and arms. It seemed to me I could have 
kept then and there employed, six or eight more of 
these members. I realized then the great advantages 
for such kind of work possessed by certain monkeys. 



;>;> 



who could have slung themselves airily and grace- 
fully from a branch, by their strong and flexible ex- 
tension of vertebra 1 , leaving all the arms and legs 
free for other uses. I was so reflecting when I heard 
a tiny, modest drop to earth. It was the gimlet, for 
which I had immediate use. It had fallen from a 
vesl pocket. A few nails gently pattered after it. 
Then there was wrath. But to what purpose? Gim- 
lets on the earth respond and rise no more to exple- 
tives than do hammers. The gimlet would not come 
to me. I went by the old and usual route to the 
gimlet, wondering, as again I wearily climbed the 
ladder, if patience to work out one's salvation must, 
like eternity, be infinite ; and if one's charity must be 
stretched to cover this total depravity of inanimate 
hammers and gimlets. 

I nailed the boxes in position. All now seemed to 
work smoothly. I finished the work, and went down 
the ladder, as I supposed, for the last time. I sur- 
veyed those four boxes with pride and admiration. 
I took awav the ladder, and lusrffecl it afar to a distant 
corner. I resurveyed the boxes, and discovered that 
one of them was hanging by a shred of bark, shaking 
with the breeze, as the nail had not penetrated to the 
wood of the tree, thus proving again the total deprav- 
ity of inanimate things. 

I would not succumb. All my pride and stubborn- 
ness was now aroused. I had ceased to regard the 
placing of those boxes on the tree as of the first im- 
portance. This, with me, had been superseded by the 
desire of winning in this game, or contest, with my 
splendid but stubborn oak. I re-erected the ladder. 



refastened the box, and then waited to see what new 
ugliness on the oak's part would come. But none 
came. I had conquered. 

During the week, several house-hunting birds have 
inspected these a] >art incuts. They seem difficult to 
suit, and make no choice. 

I thought, when I commenced writing this story, 
there was a moral concealed in it somewhere, or hang- 
ing to its skirts. Now that I have finished it. I can't 
find any. I deem it more kind and considerate to 
Leave the reader to find his or her own moral, and 
apply it where it is needed. 1 have in the past too 
much erred in going round slapping moral mustard 
plasters on people's skins, regardless whether they 
wanted them or not. 

And no bluebirds, nor any other birds, would ever 
live in those box 



CHAPTER XII. 

A MOB OF THE MIND. 

There are forty things in this house of mine 
which •• want doing," as we say. 

The tea-kettle leaks, and should be in the tinman's 
hands. The floor needs scrubbing. The invalid 
rocking-chair has a broken back. There are holes in 
the heels of sundry socks. A jar of preserves has 
soured on my hands, and needs cleaning. Various 
shelves need dusting. A lath is off the hen-coop. 
My plans for a garden are gradually maturing, and 
coming to the front. One of my hens wants to "set." 

There are two letters to write, and also some wood 
to cut, as well as water to bring, and some bread to 
be ordered from the baker. Besides which, I want, of 
all things, a rhubarb pie, and there's a broken win- 
dow to be mended. There is no end to the wants ; 
and I can plan more work for my hands in five min- 
utes, than I could do in a month. Besides, my lamp 
wants filling ; and where has that knife gone to ? 
And the wood has n't come. 

Each of these wants represents an individual, with 
a demand for time, care, and work. Collectively 
>ing upon me, they form a mob, and prevent me 
from doing anything. At times this whole mob rushes 
clamorously upon me, each yelling his demand, and 
insisting on being served first. I have endeavored 



58 



to accommodate them, by serving them as fasl as pos- 
sible. This endeavor was a failure. I satisfied none, 
did nothing well, and did no justice to them or my- 
self. I endeavored to mend the hen-coop, while my 
mind went back to the kitchen, where some corn 
bread was baking. Mind being off my hammer, that 
descended <>n a finger instead of a nail, tearing off 
skin and flesh. Then I smelt the corn bread burn- 
ing. It was burning. Two things cannot occupy 
the same place at the same time. Body in the hen- 
coop and mind in the kitchen mixes things up; and 
out of this maladjustment I got a bloody linger, a 
burned corn cake, an illy repaired coop, a lo- 
serenity, and a consequent loss of strength. 

I tried to write a private letter. My mind strayed 
off nn the broom lying on the floor. I rose to put it 
in its properplace, and kicked over a pot of red paint. 
Another mixture of mind and matter ensued. 

The next day the same mob came clamoring about 
me. I then arose, equal to the emergency. I said. 
"This row must be stopped. I'll stop it first in my 
mind. Though chaos reign in the house, though 
everything wants doing, there shall be but one thing 
done at a time, by as much of this mind and body I 
carry about me as I control. Out with ye all! 
Begone ! till I can make up my mind which of you 
is a must <»r not — a mere want or a pressing 
need, a thing which my comfort requires for the hour. 
or a thing which can be put off till tomorrow with- 
out damage." 

The mob simmered down to a few individuals. 
Beyond cutting some wood, bringing some water, and 



59 



two or three other " chores," there was nobody but 
oould afford to wait. 

I attended to these "musts," and then applied my- 
self to one of the unnecessaries. 

This one was my garden. I am cultivating a few 
plants, native to the soil, which I transplant from the 
Deiffhboring thicket. I want to give these floral 
aborigines a show, and see what they will come to. 
I transplanted four very small young cedars, and in 
the middle placed a very pretty wild running vine, 
whose common name I don't know, and whose botan- 
ical name I don't want to know. 

S< i far so good. I was working leisurely and pleas- 
antly, feeling it rather a holiday business than other- 
wise, when suddenly a vast ambition came into my 
mind, to make a series of circles and walks of a 
number of young cedars, and adorn a much larger 
Bpace with other plants. Ere I was aware of it the 
ambition grew, possessed, and governed me. I was 
hurried by it, strained by it, and tired by it. I found 
myself rushing to and from the grove with trans- 
planted plants, digging furiously, and setting my 
mind far ahead of my work. In fact, one of the 
mob of wants, desires, plans, whims, aspirations, call 
them by what name you please, had captured me, and 
was making a slave of me. I sat down and said, 
M This row must stop, too, and order shall reign in 
Warsaw. I will not be commanded by all or one of 
you." 

I abandoned the great gardening ambition, and con- 
fined it to its original proportions. Then I felt bet- 



♦ ;<» 



ter. That row was stopped. But all are not 
stopped. This empire of mind has long been badly 
governed, and something like insurrection still exists 
in it. These old iocs are always at the gates, ready 
to rush 10 at the least opening. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

PAINTING THE HOUSE. 

I am now engaged in painting the interior of 
my house in various colors. Some might call it daub- 
ing. I call it frescoing. I have a right to dignify 
my own style of ornamentation by the best name I 
can find. 

I am also painting the furniture, and all the do- 
mot ic appliances I can lay hands on. My pails, 
kerosene-can, and coal-scuttle are now of a bright 
vermilion. The general color of walls and floor is 
red. The beams are to be blue, or any other color 
handy, when the time comes to paint them. 

I like a good deal of red in the inside of the house, 
because it seems or feels a sort of warm color. Some 
would call my taste gaudy. Be it so. Perhaps I am 
in the gaudy phase of existence. So may be some 
other power, when it paints the rose, or the peony, 
the apple, or the sumach cluster of berries. 

I do not make work of this painting. I paint at 
odd intervals, when the inspiration is upon me. It is 
a pleasant way of filling in certain little chunks of 
time, which otherwise might be tedious. The paint- 
shop occupies one certain shelf, and is always ready 
for business. A mixture of oil, turpentine, and color- 
ing matter is all that is needed. 

The advantage of painting in this way, lies in the 

61 



62 



Liberty] enjoy to paint as I please, or " paint out" 
as I please. J paint for fun ; when it becomes work. 
I stop painting. I get the same pleasure out of this 
style of painting, that the child docs in coloring 
yellow the picture of the battle of Bunker Hill, and 
dyeing the fallen Genera] Warren a marine blue. 
It's innocent recreation, even if you call it childish. 
Besides, I care little whether you call it childish 01 
not. I might say that your painting your expensive 
house by hired painters, or the laying out of your 
grounds by hired gardeners, or the stabling and care 
of your horses by hired grooms, or the keeping and 
sailing of your yacht by hired sailors, involved only 
another system of playthings for you, the man. the 
k - child of larger growth." Only it is doubtful if you 
get as much comfort out of these as I do from a 
dollar's worth of paint and paint-brushes. Still, I 
hope you do, and more. I have a right to enjoy my- 
self in a " childish" fashion, and I hold a childish 
pleasure to be better than a matured pain. 

I observe that the work, be it what it may. that is 
best done, is that in which the doer becomes most 
absorbed, heart, soul, mind, and body, and then it 
ceases to become work at all. It is play. When the 
true artist finds himself " working " on his picture, 
he will lay aside his brushes, and wait till he van 
again make play of his occupation. The divinity of 
art doesn't work at all : no more than the race-horse 
'•works" when endeavoring to pass his rival, or the 
bird ••works'' in its joyous song, or flight. Cart 
horses "work." So do men, women, and children. 
compelled through circumstances to use brain, bone, 



63 



and muscle, from sunrise to sunset, and who fag on 
through tin 1 Long afternoon hours, until all interest, 
pride, or pleasure in their occupation is gone, because 
there is no strength left to keep it up. 

Having for seven years swung a pick in the mines 

iA California, I know something practically about 

work. Picking and shovelling dirt was fun for me 

till eleven or twelve o'clock in the morning. In the 

afternoon it soon became work. I noticed that my 

"pards" also took longer rests in shovelling after 

three or four o'clock, and that the flight of the sun 

toward the western horizon was watched with much 

greater interest after that hour. Why? Because 

their occupation had ceased to be play, and body and 

soul, too, were crying out for rest, and a chance to 

recuperate. The fire in the blood was nearly out ; 

the lamp of life was burning lower, and Nature was 

asking that these lamps be taken home and refilled. 

Of course my paint flies around at times, specking 

and staining various articles. There are flecks of 

red on the marine blue, and vice versa. The floor 

has received more or less involuntary painting, and 

sundry utensils show the marks of my colored April 

shower. 

I do not allow such trifles to trouble me. If I did, 
my house would soon be as full of trouble as it is 
now full of paint stains. I think that one of the 
first steps on the road to heaven is the ability to 
cease to be annoyed by trifles. Did I give way to 
the bent of the evil inside of me, I could soon become 
as much annoyed by a paint stain, or a grease spot, 
or a broken saucer, or any other occasional house- 



64 



hold irregularity, as I would be by the Loss of a 
friend. I can allow these troubles so to grow on me 

as to absorb and swallow up a great deal of my 
capacity for enjoyment of other things. I desire and 

aim to paint as smoothly as I can: to Leave no "holi- 
days'* on the wood, as the sailors call the bare marks 
left by a slovenly ship painter. lint when I do make 
them, as often I do, I am not going to be over- 
whelmed by them. They are mistakes and errors. 
They are my mistakes and errors. Being mi] 
have a right to them, and all the annoyances, or ex- 
perience, or wisdom, through such experience, they 
may bring me. And any other mistakes I may make 
in life, great or small (and I expect to make many), 
I hold in the same regard. 

Or rather, I preach this doctrine to myself, but do 
not always practice it. It is so much easier to preach 
than to practice. 

I find great use and enjoyment in my house paint- 
ing, other than that conferred by the exercise. It 
affords in doors a continual change of scene and 
color. I don't want to paint the whole interior at 
once. I would not be able to enjoy the whole at 
once as in detail. It is, so to speak, too big a meal — 
of paint. But when, in a leisure moment. I cover a 
square yard of the house red, I enjoy the change of 
color that it brings, and the contrast with the bare 
board still unpainted. This makes of my painting a 
prolonged and continual feast. It gives variety. 
I>veiy day. through these small efforts, I enjoy a con- 
tinual change. Being at full liberty to do as I pL 
I can. when one set of colors tires me. change them 



65 



for another, in the same gradual way. As for finish- 
ing this prolonged holiday of painting, and sitting 

down and saying. " I am done.*' I want no such 
consummation. I intend painting on indefinitely. 
There is, for me, a large moral hidden in this matter. 
I leave it to the reader to pick out for him or herself. 

There is also another pleasure in this occupation, 
because I feel at full liberty to make my house look 
as frightful as I please, without caring what people 
will say. Having no neighbors or callers here, I am 
entirely free from the tyranny of " what people may 
say." This is a luxury worth about forty dollars a 
month. 

I am only copying Nature's process out of doors. 
She is painting in all the colors of the early spring 
foliage. The fields are showing their first faint 
tinge of green. Day by day it deepens. There 's a 
blush of " Indian red " in the woods. That comes of 
the first burst of the elder buds. The other colors 
are gradually coming in and blending together. But 
Nature is the great, grand painter who frescoes the 
whole land, save where it is dotted and blotted with 
the big cities, where trees are so much left out, 
because they are in the way of trade. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

BARROWFUL OF "BLUES." 

It was a rainy day. very black, very wet, the 
ground a muddy sop. the sky a dull. Leadenish-hued 
dome. It gave me a tit of the "blues." I raked up 
certain old griefs oul of tin- ashes of the past, bor- 
rowed some oew troubles out of the future and put 
them all under the powerful microscope of a morbid 
imagination, which magnifies tin- awful about a 
thousand times, and diminishes the cheerful, when 
applied to it. in a similar proportion. 

I notified the world that it was an unfit place to 
live in. a "vale <>f tears," a shame and disgrace to its 
Maker. In about an hour. I had arranged for myself 
a large and commodious hades, where, on every side, 
naught was to be seen hut the wrecks of all earthly 
hopes, lying about in dust and ashes, and every ideal 
a will-o'-the-wisp, leading to quagmires of disappoint- 
ment. 

Finally, all this became so horrible that at last it 
occurred to me that it was about horrible enough. 
It was more than I could bear. I said. " I am satis- 
fied. I've got all I want of this. Why is this black- 

, anyway? The sun was bright yesterday. 
was I. That same mid is shining somewhere today. 
I think I have got about the same mind I had yea 
day. Isn't it capable of enjoying, as then ? Whence 

66 



.17 



this difference in my views of life? Then I was on 

1 terms with the world and myself. Is fchis -loom 

owing to a few billion drops of water Palling from 

above? Is it due to the sombre hue of the clouds, 
the dirty sop under foot, and the general deadness of 
the landscape, which in a short time will have all 
its new spring verdure? Am I to be so downcast 
merely by a color?" People are depressed or 
cheered by surroundings. Nobody goes into a dark 
cellar to spend a cheerful evening. 

That bird in the tree yonder sings merrily enough, 
despite the rain. How does he keep up his spirits in 
such weather ? If the bird can throw off this gloom, 
so ought I. 

Among the people inside of me is one who, at 
times, advises and suggests. He is not a favorite of 
mine, since he is apt to intrude his monitions when I 
least want them, possibly because it is then they are 
most needed. 

" If you will allow me," said he, " to make a sug- 
gestion. I don't want to intrude advice on you. I 
know it 's disagreeable. I hate it myself. It has a 
preachy-preachy, reproving, I-am-better-than-thou sort 
of twang, and it' s hard to take. Besides, there 's so 
much of it in the world. Everyone seems to carry a 
dose in his pocket — not for himself, but for others. 
Still, I would like to make this suggestion to you, 
and please hear it, just as you hear that bird singing. 

" You know wdiat you Avant. That 's a gain. You 
want to get your thoughts out of the gloomy rut 
they 're now running in. It 's a big step for you to 
know what you want in your case. Many people 



.;s 



afflicted with the 'blues' do not make any effort to 
get rid of them. They allow their minds to travel 
over and over the same gloomy road. They allow 
their moods to command them, instead of trying to 
command their moods. You know that you want to 
get your mind out of that mood. Now wheel that 
barrow to the wood-shed: wheel it as carefully as 
you can : make a game of wheeling it : wheel it 

through the Stubble field so as to expend the least 

possible Labor in the wheeling; wheel it so as to 

avoid holes, and rocks, and miry places; put your 
whole mind on the harrow, and when you yet to the 
wood-shed, pile it very carefully with wood; pile 
the sticks nicely, so they will not fall off: pile them 
with attention, precision, and daintiness : then wheel 
the barrow hack to the house, with the same care : 
cany the wood into the house; don't fling it down 
by the stove, as you would throw a snake off your 
person, but put all your mind on piling, so as to make 
a neat, creditable pile, and see then if a part of your 
honors, at least, are not cast out of you." 

"This is something like prescribing those seven 
baths in the river Jordan to that scriptural genera] 
for his complaint," I thought. "However, the baths 
cured him. I '11 try the barrow cure." 

I wheeled the barrow a short distance, made a 
game of it, in getting the greatest amount of go out 
of the vehicle, with the least amount of push, 
avoided ruts, stones, and the deeper hollows. I did 
feel somewhat lighter. I seemed to be wheeling it 
out of hades. But all at once, involuntarily. I 
relaxed my vigilance in fixing my brains on the bar- 



69 



row. I ran in a rut, — two ruts. The barrow in 
one : niv thoughts in that old, gloomy nit of reeol- 
lection and anticipation. "The bright days of yore 
that would never come back." The " What 's the 
use of living, anyway ? " The absent never to 
return, or if returned, to return changed. The 
k * What 's it all for? " The fleeting years, the growing- 
old, the "ah me!" and the "heigh-ho!" and "such 
is life" — that remark with which so many close 
up some sad story, and which seems to say, " Well, 
it \s the best life and the best world we 've got, any- 
way, and mighty poor affairs, both of them, at 
that." 

" There you go," said my monitor, " off in the rut 
again ; never mind, it 's habit. Your mind has been 
so long in this habit, it runs into it involuntarily. 
Your doors open so easily into your hades, hinges all 
oiled, bolts ditto ; they turn so easily. The others, 
opening to the brighter rooms, are all rusty, from 
want of use. Got lots of work before you to set this 
thing to rights. You must try again, and fail, and 
keep on trying, and fail and fail and fail, and try and 
try and try, and fail and try, and try and fail, a long- 
time. No other way out of it. Sure cure in time, 
but a long time to make the sure cure. It's all a 
part and parcel of this " working out your salvation." 
When you get practice enough to keep your mind 
fixed on a certain subject for, say ten or fifteen 
minutes, why, then it will stay fixed of its own 
accord, until you want to change it." 

I put my mind on the work again, and wheeled 
about half a dozen steps. Then my pet grievance 



70 



got into the barrow. I forgot the wheeling. The 
grievance thus worked on my mind: "If So-and- 
so had "lit said this and that. I know I was partly 

wrong. But, by George! I never went so far i 
Bay, or to think, or to do — " 

•• 5Tou're off again," said tin- adviser; "you're not 
attending to that harrow." 

I buckled to the barrow. "Gracious," went my 
mind. -Can't I put this mind of mine on one par- 
ticular thing for ten seconds? What a weak thing 
it is. to be forever slipping off the work right in 
hand."* 

••You're off in another rut." said my monitor. 
••Think of the work, and not of your mind's weak- 
ness." 

•• I was thinking how much truth there is in what 
you say," I remarked. 

The reply was : "Don't think even of that! 
Think of nothing but the barrow. -Stick to the har- 
row. Work at the barrow. Work out the salvation 
of the hour and the minute on that barrow." 

I wheeled a dozen steps more. Then the pet fear 
came before me, black as a thunder-cloud, and my 
mind reveried gloomily thus: "It'll all go w: 
Everything does. Just my luck. I've put myself in 
this position. What can I say? What — " 

"Barrow ! Barrow ! " called out the adviser. 

" Hang the barrow ! " J thought. " I want to think 
over my troubles in peace, and without being dis- 
turbed. Besides, what a ridiculous idea to put all 
dne's mind on such an insignificant thing as a wheel- 
barrow, and neglect the great concerns of life. 



"Great fiddlesticks !" said the monitor. "Lei me 
tell vou that the great concerns of life are what you 
call the little concerns. It's the little neglects that 
make the great accidents: the pebble on the rail that 
may throw the train off the track: the arsenic left on 
the provision shelf that's mistaken for baking powder, 
and poisons the family: the ladder that you're too 
lazy to adjust properly that tumbles and breaks your 
the mouthful of food that you shovel into your 
mouth as if it were corn into a hopper, that gives you 
an indigestion, and makes you unfit for business or 
pleasure : the tack you recklessly throw on the floor 
runs into your foot and gives you the lockjaw ; the 
•t' in writing you neglect to cross, and carelessly 
make with a loop instead of a straight line, so that 
your word spells 'lie' instead of "tie,' and gets you 
into an awful entanglement with your best friend." 

•* That's the reason you never could learn to waltz. 
You put your mind, or tried to, on half a dozen steps 
at once, instead of one at a time. Pretty mess you 
made of it: jumbled and tumbled them all up to- 
gether. You know your dancing-master gave you 
up in despair — said he never could make you dance 
lower down than your waist — never could get any 
dance in your legs, because you wouldn't or couldn't 
get your brains into them." 

So my monitor went on scolding, while I. again 
forgetting my barrow, went maundering off into a 
possible trying interview with a certain person which 
will probably never transpire, saying to myself : " I 
shall just go, and when I do see him I'm going in a 
gentle, mild form, and forgiving frame of mind. I'm 
going to fix up a mental state in advance." 



72 

Said the monitor: -You've do bus ring up 

mental states in advance. You've no bos 
take any thought just now what you'll say or do 
days hence. Your business now Lb to wheel that 
harrow. Put all your strength on that, and let the 
future take eare of itself. Do have some eonsider- 
ation for your pour anus and legs. Put your mind 
into them, and not send it away a hundred mil 
more, or distribute it over forty objects, plans, whims, 
wants, and purposes for tomorrow. Let the morrow 
and the future take eare of themselves, and you take 
eare of that barrow." 

But I couldn't. I failed. I couldn't wheel that 
barrow more than ten >tep> but that. some miserable 
thought, whim, trouble, or anxiety would slip in and 
unseat what I call my mind. I couldn't -beat the 
game." Still I do retain a faith in its curative prop- 
erties for the blues, if long enough persisted in. 



CHAPTER XV. 

OMEGA. 

And after all the house proved a failure, so far as 
my permanent happiness was concerned. When it 
was finished, and my corn was coming up, and my 
liens were in laying order, and three had commenced 
setting, and the morning-glory vines had commenced 
peeping in at the front windows, I commenced to 
mope. I could not get the happiness out of my 
hermitage that I had anticipated. I had imagined 
I could live happily alone with nature, and largely 
independent of the rest of the human race. I 
couldn't. I don't believe anybody can. Nature 
herself taught me better. I found that the birds 
went in pairs and in flocks; that plants and trees 
grew in families; that ants lived in colonies, and 
that everything of its kind had a tendency to live and 
grow together. But here I was, a single bit of the 
human race, trying to live alone and away from my 
kind. The birds and trees were possibly glad of my 
admiration for them, but they said : " You don't 
belong to us. You shouldn't try to belong to us. 
You belong to your own race ; go join them again ; 
cultivate them. We live our own lives ; you can't 
get wholly into our lives. You 're not a bird, that 
can live in a nest and on uncooked seeds ; or a squir- 
rel, that can live in a hole in a tree ; or a tree, that 

73 



74 



ran root itself in one place and stay there, as yon "vc 
been trying to do. A hermit is one who tries to be 

a tree, and draw nourishment from one spot, when 
lie's really a great deal more than a tree, and must 
draw life and recreation from many persons and 
places. A bear is not so foolish as to try and live 
among foxes; neither should a man try to live en- 
tirely among trees, because they can't give him all 

that he must have to get the most out of life." 

So I left my hermitage, I presume, forever, and 
carted my bed and pots and pans to the house of a. 
friend, perched on the brink of the palisades opposite 

Tinker's. 



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You travel when you sleep. 
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The process of 7-e-embodiment. 
Re-embodiment universal in nat- 
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The art of forgetting* 
7/07O thoughts are born. 



The law of success. 

How to keep your strength. 

Consider the lilies. 

Art of study. 

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Some laws of health and beauty. 

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Law of marriage. 

7 he God in yourself 

Force, and how to get it. 

The doctor within. 

Co-operation of thought. 



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Use your riches. 

The healing and renewing force 

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SKETCHES. 



THE CALIFORNIAN'S RETURN 

OR, 

TWENTY YEARS FROM HOME. 



You went to California in 1852. Yon return 
home, for the first time, in 1872. Your home, in an 
eastern state, is Dozeville. 

For the last twenty years, yon have persisted in 
regarding Dozeville as still possessed of all the 
attractiveness it had for you in youth. Reflection 
told you it must have changed. People who had 
visited Dozeville and returned, bore back gloomy 
stories of its dullness and monotony. But you had 
not seen this. You could not realize it. There 
was. for you, but one Dozeville, young Dozeville, 
always young, because you saw it last in youth. 

In day-dreams, in river and bank claims, picking 
and shovelling up to the middle in mud, slum, and 
water ; by your cabin door, smoking the evening 
pipe ; on the sterile ridges of Nevada, prospecting 
for " ledge," you have, in imagination, many times 
visited Dozeville. You have shaken hands with all 
Id citizens ; you have been, for a time, the newly- 
returned lion of the place. No matter that letter 
after letter told you how sires, and grandsires, and 
matrons, and blooming, bright-eyed schoolmates had 

77 



dropped off; von would sec yourself, on the first 
Sunday home at Dozeville, standing in the village 
church : and with what congregation could you fill 
it. save the one you had left ? 

The dream is realized ; the continent is crossed ; 
you stand bodily in Dozeville. None knows of your 
coming. It is night ; the train has stopped at the 
depot. The railroad has been extended to Dozeville 
since you left : Dozevillians were talking of building 
this road when you were a boy. The " branch 
thirty miles in length. They were thirty years talk- 
ing it over. Old Dozevillians had lived and died 
talking of it. At last, a brisk New York speculator 
came along, and in a few months the road was built 

There is a feeble effervescence about the Dozeville 
depot when the train stops. Compared with the 
roaring, hustling, crowding bustle of a wide-awake 
town, it is as the languid pop of a stale champagne 
bottle to the roar of a forty-two pounder. You 
in a coach and are driven towards the family 
deuce. It is a cold, clear, winter's night. You look 
out; the wind is roaring through the leafles 
mores : every street has its old curve: every 1 
is in its old place. You recognize them all. as though 
}^ou had left but yesterday ; yet a gloom seems to 
hang about them, for you realize, now, that yon 
not to meet this or that old neighbor, whose daily 
coming and going from those gates seemed Bl 
unchangeable as the rising and setting of yonder 
moon. You have met your mother and sisters: yOl 
have almost been obliged to prove to them your iden- 
tity ! It was a surprise, but not exactly of the (pial- 



Til 



itv you had hoped for. They were hardly prepared 
to see a middle-aged man, worn by toil and exposure. 
The last photograph von sent home, ten years ago, 

implied still some appearance of youth. And after 
a few days, sometimes after a few hours, you make a 
discovery : you are not acquainted with your Own 
mother and sisters. Twenty years is too long- an 
absence : there is a great gap, a whole lifetime of 
incident and event between you and them. You are 
bound to a thousand Californian sympathies and 
associations, of which they know nothing. You 
betray them every hour. You are continually prov- 
ing, now that you are back at the old home, seated 
in the old arm-chair, and on the very carpet over 
which you tumbled in your babyhood, that three- 
fourths of your heart is back in the land of geysers, 
grizzlies, and gold. The mother involuntarily sighs. 
This is not the boy's heart that left her twenty years 
ago ; it is a strange man's heart, full of hopes, fears, 
plans, and remembrances unknown to her. It is a 
heart recast, remodelled. It was a beardless boy 
who left her ; from the cradle to that last parting she 
had known his whole life ; but this is a bearded man 
who has returned, with dashes of gray in his hair, 
with a different manner and a different voice. He 
brings with him the volume of tw T enty years of life, 
but she cannot read it all at once. He shows, care- 
lessly, a page here and there ; but it is broken and 
fragmentary to her. Her eyes brighten when he 
speaks concerning some event of his childhood ; 
there she is upon familiar ground ; that seems a piece 
of her own son. Hers, during your entire absence, 



80 



has been the quiet Life at Dozeville, not making half 
a dozen new acquaintances ; you have made hun- 
dreds in the same time, and you bring them all home 

with you. 

There is a younger sister in the house. She has 
held a dim recollection of you : all her lite has she 
Longed to see the mysterious brother in California, 
who is always writing home that he is on the eve of 
making a fortune. She has painted an ideal of him 
in mind, and often touched up the picture with many 
perfections. And this. you. are the reality! She 
will not, to herself, own any disappointment : but 
she did suppose him a differently appearing man. In 
a crowd, he is not the very last man she would have 
singled out for her brother ; but he would not have 
been the first. 

The morning after your arrival you behold I> 
ville by daylight. It is very much the same as when 
you left; the woods, fences, and corner posts are all 
in their old places; the vacant lots, fenced in and 
not built upon when you left, are still fenced in and 
vacant. A few veteran trees upon the main street 
have disappeared. Six new houses in twenty years ! 
One church has been moved from its former location. 
Consequent on the change, there was great dissatis- 
faction among the congregation ; a part seceded, and 
joined another denomination. It was all the work i>( 
a new minister, who had a mania for moving chun 
wherever he was settled. This occurred seven \ i 
ago ; you hear all about it before being in Dozeville 
three days. The unpleasantness has not lost its first 
lustre ; they pickle old contentions in Dozeville. and 



81 



so keep them ready for use in winter, when things 
are dull, and the branch road snowed up. 

Dozeville and the surrounding territory seem bo 
have shrunk. The day-journeys of your youth to 
Long Beach and Big Pond have dwindled to mere 
morning strolls. For years, in the mines, did you 
tramp two or three miles, over mountain and valley, 
to the nearest store, for your flour, beans, coffee, and 
pork, sometimes alter a hard day's work. Dozeville 
miles are mere parlor promenades, compared to the 
rolling, rugged, steep miles from Mexican Flat to the 
Long Gulch store. 

There are three hundred old acquaintances in 
Dozeville to be met and shaken hands with. All, 
after the first greetings, make the remark, " Grow- 
ing old, I see, like the rest of us." This, to one of 
thirty-five, from sexagenarians, septuagenarians, and 
octogenarians, is hard to bear. The next inquiry is, 
" How have you been all this time ? " This is a diffi- 
cult question, also, to find an appropriate and appli- 
cable answer for, fifteen or twenty times a day. The 
long-wished-for welcome back to Dozeville proves a 
tedious operation. The apples wither in your grasp. 
Finally, you deem it advisable to restrict the number 
of these greetings to three per day. You court 
retirement, and avoid more the locality of the dozen 
stores, constituting the pulsating centre of Dozeville. 

Let us read the Dozeville signs : 

" William Barnes, Books and Stationery." This 
is your first youthful playmate. Twenty years ago 
you left him, just launched in the Dozeville book- 
store ; he keeps it still. Then he was a ruddy-faced, 



82 



lively young man, just married ; now he has a shop- 
worn look of age. For twenty years he lias stood 
behind that counter, selling primers, slates, slate pen- 
cils, worsted, and dolls, to little boys and girls. For 
twenty years lie has trudged lour times a day — 
breakfast, dinner, supper, and bedtime — to his 

dwelling-house, three hundred yards up the .street. 
This, and a yearly trip to the city, for replenishing 
the stock of dolls, slates, pencils, and primers, has 
been his voyaging. What changes and hurry-skur- 
ryings have been yours during these twenty y< 
Up to Cariboo; down to Arizona: over the moun- 
tains to Nevada : looking on the rise and hustle of 
new mining towns; looking on them decayed, quiet, 
and deserted, years afterwards ; living now in this 
community, now in that, composed of keen, sharp. 
clever men. gathered from the ends of the earth : 
witnessing their gradual dispersion and dropping 
away, some to new tields, some to the grave: forming 
associations, and collecting remembrances never t<» 
be forgotten : and through all this. William Barnes 
has dung to Dozeville, and Dozeville has clung 
him. and has kept stationary. 

"Samuel Scoy, Attorney-at-law." Another old 
playmate. Samuel Scoy was a very troublesome boy 
in the neighborhood. lie does well to practice law 
now, lor he was always breaking it in his youth. He 
was your partner in ringing door-bells, changi: 
and robbing melon patehes. He is now a sober man 
of family. You are seated in his parlor. Your con- 
versation with Samuel Scoy partakes, not of the i 
hilarious nature of former days: somehow you can- 



83 



not find the scapegrace of old. The satan in him 

seems to have entirely died out. But the door opens, 
and an elegant woman enters. Sam Seoy — no, Sam- 
uel Scoy, Esq., attorney-at-law, introduces you to his 
eldest daughter. AVhy are you surprised? You 
might have known this. Sam Scoy was married 
before you left home. This is Samuel Scoy, attorney- 
at-law, with whiskers inclining to gray, and a man- 
ner rather stern and severe ; and this is his daughter. 
You are old enough to be the father of that self-pos- 
sessed, elegant young woman. You never thought of 
that before ; yet were she to visit Coyote camp, you 
and half a dozen other middle-aged bachelors would 
be ordering new suits from San Francisco. What 
a steady old worker is Time ! Tadpoles will grow 
to frogs ; infants will develop into elegant women. 
And this is Miss Scoy, the daughter of Sam Scoy, 
whom old Tom Bangs once gathered up by the coat 
collar and the baggy portion of his pantaloons, and 
chucked off the end of Little Neck wharf, for tam- 
pering with his eel-pots ; and you are nearly old 
enough to be a grandfather. Now you begin to feel 
your years. 

You are invited to a Dozeville evening party, 
Being a single man, you are deemed eligible for this 
sort of thing. There are present a score of old 
schoolmates' daughters, just like Miss Scoy. But 
Bill Barnes and Sam Scoy are not there. They 
renounced such parties years and years ago ; they 
are old family men. They would as soon be caught 
playing marbles on the sidewalk. You prepare to 
go, and attire yourself w r ith all the scrupulousness, 



84 



the care, and the anxiety of youth. You go, and 
find yourself a worn, out of place, aged bovine, amid 
a crowd of calves. The young ladies. Misses Scoy 
and Barnes, charming olive-branches of your school- 
fellows, survey you curiously. They have often 

heard their parents speak of yon. You were young 

and ga} along with their sires. That period, by the 
glass in which they survey life, was ages and 
ago, coeval with the American Revolution, or the 

discovery of America, or the Hood. You are an 
"old fellow." You are introduced to one after an- 
other; hut there is no affiliation, as in days of yore. 
The gap of years, crow's-feet, and straggling gray 
hairs, lie between you and them. They listen for a 
period consistent with civility, to the cracked old 
love-song of this, their fathers' friend, and then fly 
away to young Mr. Cock Sparrow, just returned from 
his first collegiate term. Cock Sparrow was not even 
an infant when you left. Now. you feel older. 
More apples have withered. 

It is your first Sunday at Dozeville, and you sit 
once more in the family pew^ at the old church. But 
the congregation seems thin. You miss many a 
stately gray head. The elders are the young men of 
1852. Still, the edifice is for you thickly peopled, 
but not with the living. When last you sat 1 
another and an older minister preached a farewell 
and admonitory sermon to that company of young 
men. bound for California. They sat together in that 
pew yonder. They expected to return in live years. 
at least, with much gold. All had sweethearts, and 
those sweethearts expected, at the expiration of those 



85 



five years, to become wives. Most of them sat in 
the choir. Some o{ their daughters sing in the choir 
today. I) nt the fathers of those young songsters 
never went to California, and forgot the pastor's 
admonitory sermon, while they mined, and traded, 
and drank, and gambled, and fought, and talked a 
language half Mexican, half English, and ran for 
office, and died violent deaths, and were elected to 
magnificent shrievalties worth $20,000 per annum, 
and learned to bake their own bread, and cook their 
own beans, and wash their own clothes. They never 
w made their piles" in the dry diggings, and lost them 
in turning the bed of the river, or were " broke," 
M strapped," or " panned out " at faro ; then made 
more piles, to be "broke," "strapped," or "panned 
out " at monte. They never went to Kern River, Gold 
Bluffs, Frazer, Colorado, Montana, or Nevada. They 
remained at home ; and when those five years were 
up, they married the girls wearied of waiting for 
the California adventurers, but few of whom ever 
returned ; and those who did, brought back sad tales 
of many who remained. Thomas Spring was a bar- 
tender ; William Dimple, a mule driver ; Jeremiah 
Goodboy, a confirmed gambler ; and it was whis- 
pered that Isaiah Sweetbriar, the deacon's son, had 
been hanged in the southern mines for stealing a 
mule. So the girls became Mrs. Barnes and Scoy, 
instead of Goodboy and Sweetbriar. All these mem- 
ories come crowding thickly upon you, as you look 
on the pew where the young men bound for Cali- 
fornia sat twenty years ago. Are not Dozevillians 
impressed, also, by these remembrances, on coming 



86 



here every Sunday ? No : the change has been grad- 
ual for them. They arc not Looking now over the 

wide and freshly cut gap of twenty years. They 

are thinking of their dinners, of Monday's washing, 
of the forthcoming festival for raising funds to re- 
paint the steeple. What a lofty steeple that was 
once ! Now the vane reaches up to the first limb 
of the right hand " Sentinel " at the Big Tree 
Grove. 

Some of the Dozevillians hold but a dim remem- 
brance of California's grand opening day, — the rush 
and gold fever of 1849; yet vessels, twenty odd 
years ago, carrying away the pick of their young 
men, sailed directly from Dozeville to San Fran- 
cisco. But other and greater events have since 
transpired. California, to many of these Dozevil- 
lians. is almost the California of thirty years ago — 
a land remote and unknown. Some of them scarcely 
know the existence of the Yosemite Valley or the 
Big Trees. You are disgusted. Worse than this: 
some of them have quite forgotten certain of the 
young men born and bred in Dozeville, long resi- 
dent in California. You speak of Tom Travels. 
who was a "Dozeville boy." Half of California 
knows Tom Travers. Here are men in Dozeville 
who shake their heads feebly at mention of Tom 
Travers. " Why, Uncle Abraham Travers' son, 
next to the oldest, say you ? Well, yes, 'pears 
if they do remember something of him." And then 
they stop, for they are hardly certain whether they 
do or not. It is not strange. Year after year in 
Dozeville have they trotted around a little circus- 



NT 



ring of life; Bitting about the same grocery stove 

in winter, sitting in the same chairs in front of that 
grocery in summer, droning over the weight of the 
last murdered hog, or the last strange face seen in 
the village ; reviewing all the Dozeville tattle, until 
all other recollection is beaten and stamped out. 
The mental horizon of these Dozevillians has settled 
thickly just outside their little circus-ring of thought. 
No wonder that they should forget the well-known 
Thomas Travers. 

You call on old Mr. Scott. He was old to you 
when a boy. He lives in and on books. He has 
travelled all over the world in books. He knows 
California well by books. He speaks of the Yo- 
Semite Valley, the Ca-lav-erous Grove of Big Trees, 
and the San Joe-a-kin River. You venture to cor- 
rect his pronunciation, but he has his own laws for 
pronouncing California proper names, and will not 
stay corrected by a snip of thirty-five. There is an- 
other trial for you. Dick Harvey, the pioneer resi- 
dent of Whiskey Flat, named by and for himself, 
has done little in California for the last twenty 
years, save dig, drink, dance and play poker. Dick's 
parents reside in Dozeville. Dick was one of that 
pewful of young men. westward bound, who lis- 
tened to the admonitory sermon. Old Mr. Harvey, 
Dick's father, calls on you, that he may learn some- 
thing of his son ; he has not heard directly from 
him for fifteen years. Dick long since renounced 
writing home, and with it all idea of ever coming 
home. Unfortunately, you know too much of Dick. 
* What is he doing ? " asks old Mr. Harvey. You 



88 



believe be is mining, and doing tolerably well. (Dick 
lias been "doing" every one he could ••make b 

raise"' from, for years and years. His best suit is 
a gray shirt and a pair of blue jean overalls. He 
aever comes to camp without making a disturb- 
ance. He was once offered $50 to quit the neigh- 
borhood and betake himself to other parts, hut 
refused to Leave under $100.) With all this fresh 
in your mind, you sit before old Mr. Harvey, who 
Longs to hear something comforting from his lost 
and never-to-be-found son. You wish that he would 
go, because it is hard work, in answering- his in- 
quiries, to equivocate, and squirm, and sneak, ami 
dodge about the truth, which is not to be told at 
all times about Dick. 

One certain opinion possesses all Dozeville. It is 
that any. man in good health, who has spent years 
i.i the land of gold, ought to have a fortune. Vainly 
\<>u reason, and attempt some explanation on this 
[>oint. Vainly you talk concerning the risks of 
mining: of the months idly spent on Pacific Flat, 
waiting for water ; of the years employed in baling 
the river's bed at drizzly Canon: of the ra< < 
expensively cut through a solid granite ledge ; of 
the flume at Split Bar, costing thousands, only to 
be swept down stream by the fall freshets: of the 
gravid, which did not prospect a cent to the cart load 
when you did get into the bed of the river: of the 
tunnel it took years to bore through the rim-rock of 
Table Mountain; of the high prices paid for water. 
which took all the life out of your profits in the 
hydraulic claim at Coyote Creek; of the capital you 



-'.I 



put into the Columbia quartz-lead, whose rock as- 
saveil a cent per pound, and whose actual returns 
fell a little short of a cent per ton ; of the fruitless 
scrambles to Krazer River, to Colorado; of the un- 
successful hunt for the Comstock extension in Neva- 
da. All this is useless. Dozevillians have it firmly 
rooted in their brains, that when a man goes to 
California, it is his duty to get rich. That he does 
not. is an indication of a loose screw in his moral 
machinery. You cannot alter their minds. They 
have been locked in this conviction for twenty years, 
and the wards are too old and rusty to be turned 
back, without danger of breaking to pieces. 

You remain in your dear old Dozeville a couple of 
months. Would you stay there for life ? Will you 
call it your home now ? 

No. no, no ! There is another land, nearer the 
setting sun, which claims you for its own. You are 
longing now for San Francisco, with its afternoon 
gales, and mosaic of nationality ; for the sight of the 
Contra Costa hills, flecked in the springtime with 
their thousand, shades of green, and cloud, and sun- 
shine ; for Tamalpais at eve, with avalanches of white 
fog rolling clown its sides ; for the great inland plains, 
walled westward by the dimly blue Coast Range, 
eastward by the far-away snow-tipped Sierras ; for 
the dark green chaparral, and the scent of pine and 
balsam in the foothills, with their rich fruitage and 
heavy laden vines. Dozeville is clear, but it is not 
galvanic enough for you. You require earthquakes, 
grizzlies, and periodical gold fevers. Dozeville is 
pleasant, calm, and quiet, but it seems the calm and 



90 



quiet of a well-kept church-yard. It abounds over- 
much with widows, carefully husbanding the prop- 
erty of deceased partners. It is outflanked by too 
many rheumatic aunts, with lame backs and Dutch 
clocks. Dozeville is dear, because it was your boy- 
hood's home. But the lively Dozeville of your youth 
no longer exists. The realized Dozeville of 1872 lias 
passed away forever. 



FRENCH WITHOUT A MASTER. 



My French teacher from East Haddam, on the 
banks of the Connecticut River, taught me French 
some thirty odd years ago. He Avas a good, honest 
man. and the only reason lie was a fraud in certain 
respects was. that he did not know he was one. He 
made me commit some words and sentences to mem- 
ory, and I repeated these to him. 

In those days this was called " learning," though 
I never could see how mere words committed to 
memory out of a book, taught a man or a woman to 
ride a horse, or sail a boat, or shoot well, or swim 
well, or manage a primary meeting, or even plead 
a case in plain, clear, common-sense fashion before 
a jury, or do anything else in which brains, clear 
sight, decision, courage, or energy were required. 

However, he taught me something called French 
in America. It was never recognized for French in 
Paris. It wouldn't wash over there. I tried it first 
on a French cabman. He didn't understand a word 
I said, until I showed him printed French in my 
guide-book, that I had been trying on him. He in- 
sisted on driving me to one place, when I wanted to 
go to another. I wanted to go to a certain hotel 
mentioned in my guide-book. I showed him the 
name of this hotel, as printed in that book. The 

91 



92 



cabman shook his head. He talked a good deal of 

his French, and in a very decided manner. I talked 
;i good deal of my French, in a very decided man- 
ner. As we did not understand each other, tic 
suit finally arrived at by either party was not clear. 
Finally I jumped into his cab. He drove off. I won- 
dered to myself, as my hones rattled over the stones, 
where Connecticul French was carrying me. He 
took me to a mean-looking house, in a mean-looking 
street. It was not the place mentioned in my guide- 
book. I again showed the cabman the former name 
and number in the book, lie shook his head, and 
poured on me torrents of Gallic un intelligibility. 
I was obstinate. He drove at last to the street and 
house I desired, and pointed triumphantly with his 
whip to the number of the building 1 had pointed 
out. It was not a hotel at all. It had been a hotel, 
but was changed into an immense clothing stoic 
I understood then what the cabman had been trying 
to tell me. Mine was an old guide-book, behind the 
times and changes of the times. However, I got 
out with my two carpet-bags and set out down the 
street, I knew not whither. I was ashamed of my 
ignorance. I pretended, however, so far as manner 
went, that it was all right : that I knew where I was 
going : that I knew what I wanted. And so I did. 
I wanted to get out of sight and sound of that cab- 
man. He looked at me as I walked off, and grinned. 
I felt his grin all through me. It made my flesh 
creep, crawl, and quiver. I knew that he knew that 
I was trying to play a part, and he knew that I knew 
that he knew it. I turned the first corner I came 



!»:', 



to, walked along the streel a short distance, turned 
back, peeped round the corner, and saw with relief 
that the fiend and his cab had gone. I felt better, 
breathed easier, and perspired freer. The first trial 
was over. I was alone in Paris ; alone, homeless and 
langnageless, with my two carpet-bags. In travel- 
ing, it is well to carry two bags. One can be taken, 
and the other left full of bricks at your hotel, as 
security for your board bill, in case your remittances 
don't come. In foreign lands, the American is never 
cashless for any other cause than that of his remit- 
tances from home not coming, which is always strictly 
true. They do not come in cases, because they never 
started to come, nor had anything or anybody to 
start them, either. 

I found a roof to shelter me at last, with a very 
kind lady, who pitied me because I should return to 
that barbarous United States, in her geographical 
estimation but a cab-drive from Brazil ; who caught 
me trying to eat my first snails raw ; who taught me 
how to cook them, by setting the shells on the coals, 
and so allowing the butter with which they close 
the shell, to run down and cook the reptile within, 
and which were to me equally tasteless, either raw 
or cooked. As an edible, I cannot indorse the snail, 
and think him better employed in his old occupation 
as the symbol of laziness, and am not sure he's not 
lazy as made out, and think he knows his own busi- 
ness best, anyway. 

I started out on my first morning in Paris, not 
knowing, not caring, where I went. I had neither 
guide nor guide-book. I did n't want so much to 



!>4 



Bee what Others had seen, as what they had n't Been. 
I was hungry. I found a restaurant. I found, on en- 
tering, thai the meal was served on an upper floor. 

I did n"t want then to go upstairs, but had no French 
at hand which would explain why I did n't want t<» 
go upstairs. So I felt compelled to go upstairs, t-> 
avoid seeming suspicious. I found a long table, and 
some folly Frenchmen seated thereat at their half- 
past-ten breakfast. There was no written hill of fare. 
I had relied on the written hill of fare, because I 
could point to the things on the paper I would eat. 
The waiter gabbled over the dishes they served. I 
could not understand a word. 1 was speechless. 
Forty Frenchmen were looking at me. I said at last 
in despair, " Pommes de terre — potato 'Ida- 

waiter talked and talked. I know now he was ask- 
ing me how r I would have them served. In France 
potatoes are served variously. How could I name 
the style I wanted? I said simply, "potato 

Potatoes — potatoes. Yet I realized the absurdity 
of ordering a breakfast of potatoes only, when there 
were so many other things to eat. I knew there 
were other good things, because I saw. them and 
smelled them to the right and left on my neighbors 1 
plates, but I knew not their French names. I <i 
not point to my neighbor's plate, and say. " I want 
some of that." The waiter brought potatoes. He 
brought them first plain boiled, in their jackets ; then 
he brought them fried; then he brought them stewed. 
Then a suspicion of a horrible truth commenced to 
dawn upon me. It had been assumed that I would 
have a potato breakfast, and of all possible styles : 



95 



and potatoes are cooked in many fashions in Prance. 

I don't know how many dishes of potatoes they did 
bring. I did know that I was an object of curiosity 

and amusement to my foreign friends present. 

I ate and perspired and was ashamed, and wished 
I was out of it. and still the potatoes kept coming. 
Somebody called for a dish which sounded like ma- 
rengo'. I counseled to myself, that if I called for 
** marengo " it might stop the avalanche of potatoes, 
as well as the quiet ridicule of my neighbors. Pota- 
toes and ridicule together are appetizing. I did n't 
know what marengo would result in, whether fish, 
flesh, or fowl. It was a sort of gastronomical lottery. 
The real name is maringot. 

I don't know now exactly what that maringot was. 
I don't want to know. If I must eat my peck of 
extraneous matter, ere I shuffle off my body this ex- 
pensive suit of mortality, which is always singing- 
out for something to put on it or in it, why should 
I insist on a chemical analysis of all I eat ? But 
the maringot was good, better than the monotony 
of ever changing and diversified courses of potatoes. 
I made it last a long time, because I wanted to put 
off, as long as possible, my next sure exposure of 
ignorance, when the waiter should come and gabble. 
It was a painful breakfast. It lasted nearly an hour. 
It gave me no good. It did give me the dyspepsia ; 
any mental strain or misery will when you 're eating. 
Anxiety is much harder to digest than fat pork. 
And all this came of learning French by the eye 
instead of the ear, of a Gaul from East Haddam, 
Conn. 



96 



I went to a bath-house. The attendant young 
woman asked me whether I would have a bath sim- 
ple or otherwise. I said simple. I was shown my 
bath-room, sin- turned on the water, and Left me 
without soap or towels. Then I understood, as 
gards a hath, what simplicity meant in France. I 
rung for soap and towels. The girl brought me pro- 
grammes of each. There were lour kinds of soap, 
and five kinds of towels — prices extra. In Europe 
everything is extra. 

There were head towels, ear towels, a. sheet to put 
on the bottom of the bath-tub. and other towels. 

I chose a thing called a p-e-i-g-n-o-i-r, which happened, 
of all the list, to be no towel at all. It turned out 
to be a hot baked linen night-gown or wrap, with 
sleeves, and open in front. When buttoned up, it 
was very becoming to me. It was hot. just as if it 
had come from the oven. On coming from my bath. 
I did n't know what to do with it, so I put it on 
and sat in it. It was comfortable, a little too hot at 
first in places, but soon cooled off. I had to get my 
money's worth out of it somehow. Its real use is 
to sit in it while you call the attendant to turn off 
the hot water and turn on the cold. 

After taking that bath I went to the station-house. 
I went i here on a tour of investigation, and because I 
was obliged to go there. Some people seek station- 
houses as some people seek greatness. Other people 
have them thrust upon them, as they have great! 
I had this station-house thrust upon me, or rather I 
was thrust inside this station-house. 

Naturally, von wish to know why. Your curiosity 



97 



is excited. I shall lei it remain excited. I shall not 
tell yon. because so long as your curiosity remains 
excited, yon are on the qui vive. That's French. 
It means there 's something more in this world you 
want to find out, and that, consequently, you have 
a purpose in life. That's a good thing to have. If 
I told you what caused my arrest in Paris, and deten- 
tion for a night in the station-house, your curiosity 
would be satisfied, and you might no longer have 
a purpose in life, or something to live for. 

The non-committal and unsatisfactory reason I 
shall give for becoming a temporary, if not an hon- 
ored guest in the Parisian station is, that I disturbed 
temporarily the peace of the French Republic. The 
French Republic then existed on a slender founda- 
tion. It didn't take much to shake its foundation. 
I was the " Not much." 

My cell was furnished with a floor, a ceiling, and 
a bench. It was as simple and primitive as Eve's 
costume before the fall. In front of it was a French 
soldier with a gun. I do not know whether it was 
loaded. I know I was " loaded," though, when I 
went in that cell. 

Being " loaded," I was taken in the morning be- 
fore a judge of some sort, examined, and discharged. 
Not knowing the language, I don't know what 
he found when he examined and discharged me. 
I should like to have examined him, but couldn't, 
as he did not speak Connecticut French. This trial 
was nothing as compared with the one which fol- 
lowed immediately. I had then to appear before a 
lady I had previously married, and account satisfac- 



dS 



fcorily, or otherwise, for my staying out all night. 

I accounted otherwise, and was " found guilty." 
But it was by 00 means all over. In France, it 
appears they discharge you first, and try you after- 
ward. At least so they did with me. 

I don't know where I was tried. I don't know 
when, I don't know who tried me. I don't care : 
I know only that, two months after my relen 
State official left a long paper at my lodgings, inform- 
ing me of the circumstance, and the amount of the 
tine and costs. When first I looked at the paper 
and column of figures, I felt as if the balance of my 
earthly life might be spent in making money enough 
to pay this fine. On closer examination, I discov- 
ered, that while the column of figures was imposing 
as to length, it was very weak as to actual amount. 
On reducing it to American currency, I found the 
entire sum to be $4.20. Justice is cheap in France. 
even if it is rather slow in transit. 

I was then worth *4.20. and desired to pay the fine 
immediately. I so desired, not so much from honor- 
able and high-minded motives, as to keep the c 
from swelling up. If they swelled, I feared in time 
they might amount to $5, and " bust " me. 1 di 
could find anybody who felt authorized to take my 
fine. I went to three or four different mayors 1 
offices. In Paris and around it there *s a mayor for 
every ward, who has a court and a court-house, and 
marries people and does other work. I went to the 
Boulogne mayor's office. They would not take my 
fine. They told me to go to Sevres. The Se 
mayor said he was not entitled to take the line, and 



99 



told me to go somewhere else. I went somewhere 

else. It was always the same story. 

You see, in France, nobody will take money unless 
they feel authorized to do so. In this particular, the 
French are wonderfully like us here in New York 
and the surrounding towns. I began then to fear 
that I might spend the remainder of my days in 
hunting an authority authorized to receive this fine, 
because if I didn't pay it I might never be able to 
quit Paris, for the reason, that within forty-eight 
hours after you enter that city, your name, age, occu- 
pation, size, weight, complexion, are taken down by 
an officer appointed for that purpose, and you are 
known and booked and registered, so that you can 
be nabbed if you 're wanted. 

I went then to my landlord for advice. He said 
to me, " Soyez tranquille." That's French. It 
means, " Keep quiet, keep shady. Stop chinning. 
Mind your own business, and let the French Repub- 
lic take care of its own. If you won't run after the 
French government, it won't run after you." I did 
so. I soye'd tranquille. I left Paris undisturbed. 
I left, a defaulter to the French Republic in the sum 
of 84.20; and I know not now to what dimensions 
it may have grown, at the rate of three cents for 
serving repeated summons. It may amount to $6. 
I am liable to rearrest for this cause the moment 
I re-enter Paris. 

I took French lessons in Paris of M. Charles and 
family. We met by appointment two evenings a 
week, and hurled murdered French and English al- 
ternately at each other. M. Charles was a scholar, 



LOO 



and well versed in English grammar. .But of the 
idiom of OUT Language he knew nothing. He used 
English wo ids with reference entirely to their signifi- 
cation in French, just as I did French words rela- 
tive to their meaning in English. He wished once 
to ask me to accompany the family to a picnic in 

the country. ** Sir/* said lie (he always called me 
"Sir Mulford," for he said he must have something 
to answer tor the invariable French prefix of mon- 
sieur), '-Sir. will yon to go for me to dine upon the 
herbs?" 

Grass diet, I thought. Does lie take me for that 
ancient vegetarian. Nebuchadnezzar? He corrected 
himself instantly. "No," said he. " What a fool 1 
am ! I mean will yon travel with me. to eat up in the 
trees?" He takes me for a giraffe now. I thought. 
But M. Charles once more corrected himself. Said 
he: " No, no, 1 am a foolish to ask you to dine with 
me like one leetle bird." You may see, at this rate. 
it took us some time to travel over a small amount 
of territory ; and you will recollect, also, that when 
you learn your French mostly from translation and 
grammar, you run the risk of making just such mis- 
takes in conversing with a Frenchman. 

M. Charles, who lived over the foundations of the 
old Bastile, was a true French gentleman, pure in 
thought, faithful to a bed-ridden mother. Loving, 
faithful and considerate to his wife, who, in her 
long black blouse, was his daily assistant in busi- 
ness (photography), and a more loving and pleas- 
ant family I never met, huddled, as eight of them 
were, in four small rooms. I met others like him. 



101 



Don't believe all you hear about French immorality. 
Don't accept implicitly, an impression of that nation, 
current among us for so many generations, given out 

and coming from a people on the other side of the 
channel, among whom, on a Saturday night, you 
may find thousands of gin palaces full of boozing, 
drunken men and women ; among whom in London's 
east end, the drunken woman is an e very-day sight, 
as common as the wife-beating husband. I am nei- 
ther defending nor abusing. The French have sins. 
So have the English. So have I. So, possibly, have 
you. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak — 
especially on an empty stomach, when the lord of 
creation has to wait ten minutes overtime for his 
dinner, and while so doing finds his wife's milliner's 
bill three times as much as he expected, when he 
has been fruitlessly running that morning all over 
town, to borrow money to meet a bank obligation, 
and just then the bungling servant girl smashes the 
new soup tureen. 

I will now for a moment become dogmatic and 
oracular. If yon want really to learn any foreign 
language, get its pronunciation in your ear first, 
and before anything else. Get one, two, three words 
of it, even before you know their meaning. Get 
the swing of their sound. Learn it as you really 
learned you own native tongue, when you were two, 
three, or four years old. If you are with people 
who talk correct English, you will talk correct Eng- 
lish. If you are much with people who talk correct 
French, you will in time talk correct French. The 
ear must be educated first, and before the eye. If 



102 



you learn to translate much French, and yon are not 
bearing it spoken, von arc teaching only your 
and your mental car is talking most of that French, 
or German, or Italian to yourself, with the English 

accent : and tor all talking purposes, with French- 
man, German or Italian, yon arc worse off than 
if you had never s.» studied at all: tor as regards 
pronunciation, yon must unlearn nearly all your 
errors of accent so acquired, before yon can com- 
mence squarely, and then when yon go to France, 
you will not he a red-handed murderer of their lan- 
guage. Of course iii France, no matter how great 
your blunders, they will compliment you on your 
growing proficiency in their language, providing yon 
pay your hills regularly. For the French arc a very 
polite people, and I like them for so being. Polite- 
ness, even if only on the surface, is. 1 think, more 
agreeable than boorislmess on the surface. One of 
my French landladies told me how they lived, dur- 
ing the siege of Paris, on horse and donkey meat. 
She explained or symbolized donkey to me. by 
raising her large hands to her ears, and working 
them donkey fashion. I understood. I tumbled 
to her vernacular racket. Then she complimented 
me on my rapid proficiency in French, and I have 
no doubt afterward remarked to her cronies, that 
the American was at home when a brother donkey 
was raised. 

After visiting the tomb of the Emperor Napoleon, 
I told a Flench lady, with appropriate seriousness, 
that I had visited the emperor's tambour, which 
meant the emperor's drum. She tried to be polite, 



L03 



but failed. She laughed in my face. I justified her 
in bo doing, and I believe thai to this day, one 
Frenchwoman believes thai one American believes 
thai the emperor carried the bass drum. Friends, 
it's a hazardous business handling a foreign tongue, 
when you're all at sea among a foreign people, be- 
cause you don't always know what you 've said 
when you 've said it, and its embarrassing, when you 
think you 've complimented a lady on her looks, to 
rind, possibly, that you 've called her an aged chicken, 
or words to that effect. 

If you want to learn French, pitch in and talk it 
when you have a chance to talk it with the French. 
Mangle it. Mutilate it. Murder it. You must blun- 
der at first in learning anything. You tumbled 
down ten thousand times in learning to walk. A 
great many of us are afraid to learn anything new, 
because we must blunder and show awkwardness 
in learning. What's the use of learning French ? 
What's the use of learning anything new when our 
bodies are forty, fifty, sixty years old. This : To 
keep young. You know, of course, that your body 
is only an instrument ; that your mind is the unseen 
power that uses it ; that if you are always in a 
fright, a fret, a worry, your body, your face, soon 
has the lines and marks of that state of mind carved 
on it. 

What's the use, then, of learning French, of learn- 
ing new games, plays, diversions, arts ? This : To 
keep young, fresh, vigorous in mind. To keep so 
in mind, and your body will follow suit. Half 
the vigor and elasticity of youth conies because it's 



104 



the season for Learning new things. Put a man at 

a desk, make him a mere copyist, a machine, with 
nothing else to do or think of. no new plans or enter- 
prises, and In- ages more in ten years than others 
do in thirty. When your mind stops growing, and 

becomes a treadmill, the body soon commences to 

decay. 

It is thinking the same old things from year to 
year, that makes men and women old. 

When a boy or a girl, man or woman stops learn- 
ing new things, they commence to fossilize. There 
are old fogies at thirty as well as sixty — of both 
sexes. There is a science or faculty of Learning to 
learn. The more things you learn to do. whether 
with the hands or the head, the more power you 
gather to do — anything. When people live up to 
this idea, — and more do live up to it now than ever 
before, — there will be no old age of senility, of leth- 
argy, of giving up all interest in life, of yawning, 
and singing out "Heigh-ho!" every five minutes, 
as if life was a burden, and you were tired of waiting 
for the undertaker to come and bury yon. 




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